Optimization of Long-Term Highway Work Zone Scheduling

With the rapid development of the transportation system, an increasing number of work zone projects come with the needs of new constructions and regular maintenance related investments in transportation. However, the negative impacts of the work zone projects on the traffic in the transportation network may be inevitable and can cause many issues socially, economically and environmentally. As such, work zone projects that aim at relieving congestion while expanding capacity of the network is becoming more important. In 2017, the Federal Highway Administration issued a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) for performance-based planning and programming. It requires state departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations to measure and report on the performance of infrastructures in the National Highway System within their jurisdictions. A series of enhanced performance measures have been developed and included in this new rule. However, it is still lacking in performance measures for assessing congestion under special events including the presence of work zones. Despite such absence of metrics which can be used for evaluation, attention should also be paid to minimize the impacts of relevant work zone activities.

This research develops and recommends practical optimization model for long-term work zone events management. In such sense, this research analyzes the impacts of the long-term work zone events on the mobility performance of the network in consideration of elastic demand. A bilevel optimization model is built which is later solved by the proposed genetic algorithm (GA). Then, Sioux Falls network is used as a case study to test the proposed GA-based model. The impacts of all work zone combinations are examined and the sensitivity analysis of the elastic demand parameter (Ω𝑤) is also conducted. Summary and conclusions are made, and further research directions are also given.