At 10:00 am on April 14th, the first phase of the "Engineering Management Forum" series of lectures of School of Economics and Management of Beihang University was successfully held on the Tencent conference platform. In this lecture, Professor Xiao-Ning Zhang, a doctoral supervisor a professor at the School of Economics and Management of Tongji University, gave us a detailed explanation of the impact of economic subsidies on increasing the capacity of transportation networks.
Professor Xiao-Ning Zhang is a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, a State Council Special Allowance Expert, a Shanghai outstanding academic leader, an outstanding academic leader in Shanghai, an executive director of the Chinese Society of Management Science and Engineering,adeputy director of the Transportation Management Research Association, and an editorial board member of "Transportation Research Part B".
Professor Xiao-Ning Zhang first took the congestion charging as an entry point and explained that congestion charges is a powerful way to improve road conditions. The research on congestion charges first started with marginal cost, and later other scholars applied operations research to related topics. There are many expansions of the research on the congestion charges, such as dynamic traffic.
From the perspective of encouraging travel, Professor Xiao-Ning Zhang proposed a comprehensive subsidy program for multi-modal urban transportation to ensure fairness. In a multi-mode urban transportation network that considers transfers between subways and includes multiple park-and-ride nodes, he designs a reasonable transportation subsidy policy according to the characteristics of transportation demand and the status of transportation network service quality to achieve the optimal flexibility of transportation network capacity.
Based on three different network capacity flexibility measurement methods, this research constructed three different bi-level programming models. The upper-level planning is a network capacity maximization problem with constraints such as road section capacity, area capacity, and parking capacity. The lower-level planning is a traffic flow allocation problem that considers the destination, traffic mode, and route three-fold selection. There are three main solutions of nonlinear bi-level programming problems, namely descent method, direct search method, and non-numerical optimization method. After comparing them, a method for solving bi-level programming problems based on sensitivity analysis is proposed. Numerical experiments prove the advantages of the comprehensive transportation subsidy scheme in improving the flexibility of network capacity and the applicability of the subsidy scheme in a multi-mode transportation network.
Subsequently, the comprehensive transportation subsidy program is compared with the two cases of no transportation subsidy and independent transportation subsidy. Then the impact of some external factors such as flexibility on the performance of different transportation subsidy programs was evaluated. It is concluded that the comprehensive transportation subsidy scheme can make full use of transportation resources. Besides, it can better adapt to the changes of network caused by external factors.
Finally, combined with the COVID-19epidemic situation, a multi-modal transportation charging and subsidy policy study is constructed to control the spread of the epidemic. The variational inequality model is applied to comprehensively analyze the migration distribution, morbidity, and traffic patterns during the Spring Festival in Wuhan. Then morbidity can be predicted by analyzing the traffic patterns of other cities.
After the speech, teachers and students actively exchanged thoughts about it. The content of this lecture explains profound theories in simple language. Everyone benefits a lot.
