This thesis proposes to investigate the evaluation and optimal design of speed limits for the purpose of safety enhancement, energy saving and emission reduction on general networks. The first chapter of the thesis discusses drivers’ compliance with speed limit. Then it focuses on characterizing travelers’ non-obedient behaviors in speed selection and the subsequent user equilibrium under a given link-specific speed limits, where the subjective travel time cost, the perceived crash risk, and the perceived ticket risk of travelers are all taken into account as determinant factors for their actual speed and route choices. An iterative diagonalization program is proposed to solve heterogeneous user classes’ user equilibrium, and the integration with NSGA-II is proposed in the third...[ Read more ]

This thesis proposes to investigate the evaluation and optimal design of speed limits for the purpose of safety enhancement, energy saving and emission reduction on general networks. The first chapter of the thesis discusses drivers’ compliance with speed limit. Then it focuses on characterizing travelers’ non-obedient behaviors in speed selection and the subsequent user equilibrium under a given link-specific speed limits, where the subjective travel time cost, the perceived crash risk, and the perceived ticket risk of travelers are all taken into account as determinant factors for their actual speed and route choices. An iterative diagonalization program is proposed to solve heterogeneous user classes’ user equilibrium, and the integration with NSGA-II is proposed in the third part of the thesis to optimize link-based speed limits for the tri-objective bi-level problem minimizing total travel time, system crash rate and total vehicular emission at the same time. Both of the models are discussed with examples. This thesis provides a new angle to look at the impacts of speed limits on traffic equilibrium and system performance in general networks, and helps the system planner to design the link specific speed limits for multi-objective system optimization.