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This paper briefly considers the objectives of road congestion pricing and identifies prerequisites to the successful application of such a pricing scheme. The paper is divided into two sections. In the first section, a mathematical analysis of the constituents of an optimal road congestion price is offered. The eliminated inefficiency loss achieved by the introduction of a congestion levy is usually evaluated by means of an integral involving marginal trip cost, travel demand and average trip cost in two-dimensional (travel time, traffic flow)-space. In this section we show that this loss may, in fact, be evaluated more easily for a general marginal trip cost function and a linear demand function as the difference between the areas of a rectangle (representing the part of road agency revenue that lies below the original trip cost) and a triangle (representing the loss of consumer surplus of the reduced traffic) in (travel time, traffic flow)-space, eliminating the need to use integration. The next section deals with the application of the illustrated mathematical principles and proofs to a hypothetical case study relating to road congestion pricing in Cape Town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of non-Markovian stochastic Petri nets is employed in this paper to derive an alternative method for studying the steady state behaviour of the M/G/1 vacation queueing system with a limited service discipline. Three types of vacation schemes are considered, and systems with both a finite population and those with an infinite population (but finite capacity) are considered. Simple numerical examples are also provided to illustrate the functionality of the methods and some useful performance measures for the system are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A local search framework for the (undirected) Rural Postman Problem (RPP) is presented in this paper. The framework allows local search approaches that have been applied successfully to the well-known Travelling Salesman Problem also to be applied to the RPP. New heuristics for the RPP, based on this framework, are introduced and these are capable of solving significantly larger instances of the RPP than have been reported in the literature. Test results are presented for a number of benchmark RPP instances in a bid to compare efficiency and solution quality against known methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]