Proceedings of the International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management

Rome, Italy, July 22-24, 2020

Optimization of Toll Plaza in Different Lane Configuration

1 Shakir Ahmad, 1 Muhammad Usman, 2 Shahid Ali, 3 Saman Shahid
1
Department of Civil Engineering, University of Management & Technology (UMT), Lahore,
Pakistan.
2
Department of Civil Engineering, National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences
(NUCES), FAST Lahore, Pakistan.
3
Department of Sciences & Humanities, National University of Computer & Emerging Sciences
(NUCES), FAST Lahore, Pakistan.
Correspondence: drshahidsaman@gmail.com

Abstract
In the recent decades, the congestion pricing has gained much attention to manage traffic congestion on major arterial
roads in peak hours. Many travelers are undergoing through traffic congestion on the inner city roads and the highways
as well. On the highways, toll plazas are majorly causing congestion. Toll plazas are also necessary for some reason
even they cause traffic congestion. It has also came to know that traffic congestion plays a major role in air pollution.
With the recent advances in technology, the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has yielded an electronic toll
collection system (ETC), which is known as E-tag. The prime objective of this study was to evaluate the waiting time,
queue length and throughput of the traffic queue on toll plaza and to propose an optimal simulation based approach,
which uses lane configuration system in mixed traffic environments. Monthly throughput on daily basis was collected
at plaza. On monthly trend, it has been observed that the maximum throughput, Queue length and waiting time is on
weekends. After that, the data was collected between 04:00 PM – 10:00 PM during the month of June of 2019 during
weekend. The simulation was done based on PTV VISSIM software to determine the waiting time in different
scenarios of existing scheme, 3M-tag, 2ACM + additional toll lanes, 2-M tag + 2ACM + additional toll lanes, 4-M
tag + 2ACM + additional toll lanes, 6-M tag + 2ACM + additional toll lanes, all E-tag lanes, and E-tag + additional
toll lanes. The simulation results showed that the waiting time can be significantly reduced by changing the lane
configuration. The results showed that waiting time can be reduced up to 93.66%, queue length up to 57.69% and the
throughput up to 75.94%, as compared to the existing scenario in the evening peak hours. The study can be used as a
milestone in determining the best lane configuration for mitigating the waiting time menaces in similar scenarios of
toll collection systems in Pakistan.
Abbreviations: Planung Transport Verkehr Vissim (PTV Vissim); M-Tag (More Tag); ACM (Automatic Coin
Machine); ETC (Electronic Toll Collection) or E-Tag; ITS (Intelligent Transport System

Keywords:
Toll collection optimization, Lane configuration, Waiting time, Queue length, Throughput

Biography
Shakir Ahmad has done his BSc Civil Engineering from UET Taxila (2011-2015) and MS Civil Engineering from
FAST NUCES Lahore (2017-2019). He is currently working as a Lab Engineer in Civil Engineering Department,
School of Engineering, University of Management & Technology (UMT), Lahore, Pakistan. His current research
interests are as follows: Traffic Modeling, Intelligent Transportation Systems Engineering, Urban Travel Behaviors,
Sustainable Transport and Public Transportation Management.

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