An approximate algorithm for the Lane Reservation Problem in Time Constrained Transportation

Abstract

This paper considers a new transportation problem: Lane Reservation Problem in Time Constrained Transportation. This kind of problem comes from large sportive events in a city or region where the travel time between sportive villages and stadium should fall in a strict time window. To guarantee the athlete transportation in time, the problem consists in temporarily creating special lanes on roads in the transportation network while minimizing the traffic impact to the daily traffic. The corresponding objective is to minimize the total weighted cost of reserved lanes. In this paper, we construct a new integer linear programming model for the problem, which describes the problem more accurately. Because the complexity of the problem, we propose an efficient tabu search heuristic to obtain near optimal solutions and compare it with the solutions obtained by the heuristic proposed in [1]. Computational results show that average gap between solutions obtained with the proposed tabu search heuristic and by a software package (Cplex) is less than 5.71% for large size instances, and the average computational time of solutions proposed by the heuristic is less than 39.414 second.