Selection and Scheduling of Interdependent Transportation Projects with Island Models

Abstract

One major issue in solving the problem of selecting and scheduling interdependent transportation projects is the complex interdependence between projects that makes it difficult to evaluate the effects of individual projects or sets of projects. Previous researchers have developed mathematical models that capture some benefit and cost interactions among projects. Such models usually can handle some simple cases in which only pairwise interactions between projects exist, but they may not be realistic enough to capture the complex project interdependence for general transportation networks. Other issues arise in developing the algorithms to optimize the selection and scheduling of projects under resource constraints. For real applications, the developed algorithms should be effective and efficient in solving the problems for sizable transportation networks. To deal with these issues, this paper develops island models, which are variations of traditional genetic algorithms, for optimizing project selection a...