A Tabu Search Based Approach for Work Zone Scheduling

This paper introduces a work zone scheduling methodology, which is intended to be used as a decision – aid tool for transportation planners that have to undertake a number of work zones larger than the available number of construction crews during a given time period. Two traffic assignment approaches are used to evaluate the traffic delay caused by work zone combinations and a Tabu Search methodology is employed to select the schedule with the least total traffic delay. The approach is implemented and tested on an example network and on a large-scale realistic network, the Columbus, OH urban network. The results show that substantial network improvements can be obtained by accounting for work zone impacts and implementing appropriate schedules.