In the past four years, weight-in-motion (WIM) technology has been extensively used by toll stations to strengthen enforcement on operating vehicles in China, considering increasingly serious overloading problem. To evaluate the impacts of WIM on daily operations of toll plazas, a novel microscopic System Dynamics (SD) simulation model developed for highly concurred and manually operated loading-based toll plaza was presented in this study. In the model, queuing length (in meters) was selected as the key factor of tollbooth choosing instead of number of vehicles and feedback of queuing length on service time was considered. Real world data collected at No. 2 Yangtse River Bridge toll plaza in Nanjing Beltway was used to validate the developed model. Statistical tests indicated that there is no significant difference between measures of effectiveness (MOEs) obtained from the model and those collected in the real world. The validated simulation model was used to evaluate the impacts of traffic volume, truck percentage, truck service time, and number of opened tollbooths on toll plaza operation.Furthermore, scenario of introducing electronic toll collection (ETC) manner was evaluated using collected data and certain initialized parameters.The simulations results show that the WIM technology does decrease the efficiency of toll plaza operation; improvement on truck service time is important under increasing traffic demand; and if the traffic volume is less than 2500vph or the percentage of ETC customer is less than 15%, adding ETC toll-lanes is not effective for improving the overall efficiency of the toll plaza.
Abstract