Utilization Management and Pricing of Parking Facilities Under Uncertain Demand and User Decisions

Excessive search for parking spots in congested areas contributes to additional travel delays and negative socio-economic impacts. While managing parking utilization to address the agency's objectives, it is often very beneficial to reflect the diversity of users' behaviors and their travel choices. This paper develops a stochastic dynamic parking management model, under competitive user-agency perceptions and uncertain user demand and parking occupancy, to simultaneously minimize the total travelers' costs and maximize the parking agency's revenue. The problem is formulated into a dynamic programming model and solved using a stochastic look-ahead technique based on the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm to determine optimal actions on parking price assignment and spot utilization over time. The numerical experiments on a hypothetical and empirical case study are conducted to show the performance of the proposed algorithm and to draw managerial insights. The results are compared with those of benchmark algorithms, which indicate that the proposed methodology can determine near-optimal solutions efficiently.