A heuristic method for the minimum toll booth problem

This paper addresses the toll pricing problem in which the objective is to minimize the number of required toll facilities in a traffic network. The problem is shown to be NP-hard. To obtain a solution in a reasonable time, an effective metaheuristic algorithm is developed. The algorithm uses a local search technique in which the neighborhood function employs the dynamic slope scaling procedure to deal with the fixed charge nature of the objective function. Numerical results from 50 randomly generated and three real networks are reported.