Combination of tradable credit scheme and link capacity improvement to balance economic growth and environmental management in sustainable-oriented transport development: A bi-objective bi-level programming approach

In this paper, we propose a bi-objective bi-level programming model to balance economic growth and environmental management, which orients sustainable transport development by combining a tradable credit scheme (TCS) and a link capacity improvement measure. At the upper level, the decision maker aims to both maximize the economic benefit and minimize the total amount of traffic emissions by the optimal determination of a TCS and a link capacity improvement measure. The lower level is the user equilibrium problem, with elastic origin-destination (O-D) demand given the TCS and link capacity expansion measure. Further, a relaxation algorithm with a series of transformations is proposed to solve the proposed model. Numerical experiments illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed bi-objective bi-level model as well as the proposed relaxation algorithm. This study demonstrates how economic and environmental goals are influenced by the implementation of different development patterns comprising TCSs and link capacity improvements.