A Hybrid Methodology for Freeway Work-Zone Optimization With Time Constraints

Abstract

To reduce the negative impacts of highway maintenance on traffic, lane-closure schedules, work-zone configurations, and traffic-control strategies should be carefully planned. In this article, optimization techniques are applied to determine the appropriate work-zone plans which can minimize the total costs including agency costs, road-user delay costs and accident costs, subject to working time constraints. A heuristic optimization algorithm, named two-stage modified simulated annealing (2SA), is developed to search for an optimized solution with a hybrid objective function evaluation approach (H2SA). After the decision variables are preoptimized analytically in the first stage, refined optimization is performed based on microscopic simulation models in the second stage. The results of a numerical experiment demonstrate that the H2SA can yield satisfactory solutions, which are close to the best optimization solutions based on simulation (S2SA) but obtained with much less computation time.