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                                                         Seminar
             Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
                                  The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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Title : Optimal Road User Charging Scheme Design
     
Speaker : Prof. Agachai Sumalee
    The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
     
Date : March 2nd, 2007 (Friday)
     
Time : 4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
     
Venue : Room 513, MMW Engineering Building
    (Engineering Building Complex Phase 2)
    CUHK
     

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Abstract:
 

This presentation will address the optimal design problem of selecting a charging cordon in a general traffic network. A charging cordon is a set of tolled links surrounding a designated area so that all travelers entering or passing through this area will be tolled. Travelers in the network are assumed to respond to the tolls imposed following Wardrop's equilibrium condition (selfish routing). This equilibrium condition is imposed as one of the constraints in the optimal charging cordon design problem. This problem can then be categorized as a Mathematical Program with Equilibrium Constraint (MPEC). This presentation will explain the algorithm based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) for tackling this design problem. In particular, the key development is the design of the innovative coding scheme of the chromosome for representing a charging cordon, called branch-tree framework. The method is tested with a network of Edinburgh. Although the proposed algorithm is a meta-heuristic based method, the optimization result is very promising. The optimal closed charging cordon as found by the algorithm produces a significantly higher benefit than that of judgmental cordons.


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Biography:
 

Dr. Agachai Sumalee completed his B.Eng (honour) in Civil Engineering in 1999 at King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Latkrabang (Thailand) and then received his MSc(Eng) with distinction from Institute for Transport Studies (ITS), University of Leeds. After his Master degree, in 2004 Dr. Sumalee obtained his PhD at the same institute with the research focusing on bilevel optimization and network design problem. Before taking the post as Assistant Professor at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in December 2006, Dr. Sumalee worked as a Senior Research Fellow at ITS (Leeds) since 2001. During this period, he was also appointed as a Visiting Professor at Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo in 2005 and at Department of Urban Management at Kyoto University in 2006. Dr. Sumalee has received several prestigious prizes for his research works including the Hans-Jurgen-Ewers prize for an outstanding research in infrastructure economic (awarded by Technical University of Berlin), twice outstanding paper awards of the Eastern Asia Society for Transport Studies in 2003 and 2005, and the Smeed Prize for the outstanding paper at the UK Annual Transport Conference. Dr. Sumalee is now serving as an Associate Editor of Network and Spatial Economics Journal and a committee member of Network Modeling Committee of US Transportation Research Board. He is also a member of the international scientific committee of the European Workshop on Evolutionary Computation in Transportation and Logistics. He also serves as a referee for several international journals, e.g. Transportation Research Part A, B, C, D, European Journal of Operations Research, Applied Mathematic Letters, Journal of Scheduling, Journal of Computer-Aided in Civil and Infrastructure Engineering.


************************* ALL ARE WELCOME ************************

     
Host : Professor Leung, May-Yee, Janny
Tel : (852) 2609-8238
Email : janny@se.cuhk.edu.hk
     
Enquiries : Bolin Ding or Jeffrey Xu Yu
  : Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management
    CUHK
Website : http://www.se.cuhk.edu.hk/~seg5810
Email : seg5810@se.cuhk.edu.hk
     

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