Abstract
Purpose More and more work zone projects come with the needs of new construction and regular maintenance-related investments in transportation. Work zone projects can have many significant impacts socially, economically and environmentally. Minimizing the total impacts of work zone projects by optimizing relevant schedules is extremely important. This study aims to analyze the impacts of scheduling long-term work zone activities. Design/methodology/approach Optimal scheduling of the starting dates of each work zone project is determined by developing and solving using a bi-level genetic algorithm (GA)–based optimization model. The upper level sub-model is to minimize the total travel delay caused by work zone projects over the entire planning horizon, whereas the lower level sub-model is a traffic assignment problem under user equilibrium condition with elastic demand. Findings Sioux Falls network is used to develop and test the proposed GA-based model. The average and minimum total travel delays (TTDs) over generations of the proposed GA algorithm decrease very rapidly during the first 20 generations of the GA algorithm; after the 20th generations, the solutions gradually level off with a certain level of variations in the average TTD, showing the capability of the proposed method of solving the multiple work zone starting date optimization problem. Originality/value The proposed model can effectively identify the near-optimal solution to the long-term work zone scheduling problem with elastic demand. Sensitivity analysis of the impact of the elastic demand parameter is also conducted to show the importance of considering the impact of elastic demand parameter.
Highlights
2.3 Model formation As mentioned previously, this study proposes a bi-level programming model for determining the starting date of each work zone project
Conclusion and future study This paper analyzes the impacts of the long-term work zone events on the mobility performance of the network with the consideration of elastic demand
A bi-level optimization model is built, which is later solved by the genetic algorithm (GA) algorithm
Summary
With the rapid development of transportation system, an increasing number of work zone projects comes with the needs of new construction and regular maintenance-related. Traditional deterministic queuing theory (Dudek and Richards, 1982; Jiang and Adeli, 2003; Yang et al, 2009; Abdelmohsen and El-Rayes, 2018) and shock wave theory (Wirasinghe, 1978; Newell, 1993) can be used to evaluate travel delay and queue length on local roadway segments where road work exists (Gong and Fan, 2016) Such methods are not able to consider the broader impacts of work zones at a network level. Building upon the work of (Gong and Fan, 2016), this study uses a macroscopic optimization model to evaluate the mobility impacts of long-term work zone events (i.e. total travel delay) and optimizing the scheduling of starting dates of work zone projects.
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