Rehabilitation Project Selection and Scheduling in Transportation Networks [Research Brief]

2018PDFBriefMPC-18-358MPC-463AlgorithmsCase studiesConstruction schedulingHighway capacityHighway maintenanceImpactsNetwork analysis (Planning)Pavement wideningProject managementRehabilitation (Maintenance)Time durationUrban highwaysUnited StatesMountain Plains ConsortiumSong, ZiqiHe, YiLiu, ZhaocaiMountain Plains ConsortiumUnited States. Department of Transportation. Research and Innovative Technology AdministrationUS Transportation CollectionHighway project selection and scheduling are traditionally treated as two separate problems in the literature. It is critical to investigate how to select and schedule M&R projects in a way that can maximize their benefit or effectiveness while minimizing the traffic impacts of work zones across project development phases. There is a pressing need to develop an integrated framework for simultaneous selection and scheduling of multiple M&R projects at the network level. Among various types of M&R projects, road capacity expansion is the one that requires massive resources and takes a long time to complete. Therefore, this study focuses on the project selection and scheduling for road capacity expansion projects. In this study, we introduce time dimension into the traditional discrete network design problem (DNDP) to explicitly consider the impact of road construction work and adopt an overtime policy to add flexibility to construction duration. We address the problem of selecting road-widening projects from several candidate projects in an urban road network, determining the optimal link capacity and designing the schedules of the selected projects simultaneously. A time-dependent DNDP (T-DNDP) model is developed with the objective of minimizing total weighted net user cost during the entire planning horizon. An active-set algorithm is applied to solve the model. To demonstrate the practicability of the proposed model, two case studies are developed to demonstrate the necessity of considering the construction process in T-DNDP and to illustrate the trade-off between the construction impact and the benefit realized through capacity extension.83