When using Path-Base Tolls in Voyager via input of “FILEI TOLLMATI[#]=filename” and use of keyword “TOLLMATI=” on the PATHLOAD statement, at the start of each iteration Voyager builds paths from each on-gate of the toll system to each off-gate of the system prior to beginning regular zonal path building for the assignment. While the zonal path building can be distributed with CLUSTER, this extra step of building toll system gate-to-gate paths cannot be distributed.

As our toll networks grow in the future and for studies where we are analysing significant expansion of the tolled network, we need to incorporate many potential tolled gate-to-gate movements. For example, in our Sydney model we have more than 400 gate-to-gate OD pairs in the full toll system. When the zonal path building is distributed to each processing node, this set of toll gate-to-gate paths is built first on each node prior to that node’s zonal path building. Due to the number of cores our servers have available to distribute the full zonal path building, the time spent building the toll gate-to-gate paths is significantly longer than the time spent building the full zonal path set for each iteration.

This enhancement would implement the capability to distribute the toll system gate-to-gate path building in the same way the zonal path building is distributed using IDP. Suggestions for implementation would be to simply add a keyword to the DISTRIBUTEINTRASTEP control statement like DISTRIBTOLLPATHS=T/F with the default to T and then the toll system gate-to-gate path building would just use the same DISTRIBUTEINTRASTEP settings as provided for the zonal path building.