01629480

Component

A wide range of severe and relatively short-term disruptive events occur on transportation networks on a daily basis which causes disturbances to traffic flows thus hampering the travelers’day-to-day activity by forcing them to change routes. These events have intense impacts on network users’ travel time. Moreover, lack of funds in transportation network infrastructure maintenance is forcing national, regional and local governments to carefully prioritize their investments. Therefore, reliable quantitative tools are needed to help decision-makers in choosing their investments for maintaining, repairing and extending infrastructure segments, so that the allocation of available resources is optimized. In this research, the authors attempt to understand the relative importance of links in a road network and suggest a methodology to rank the links according to three importance factors while combining the network improvement investment decision and subsequent network user response in a feedback loop.The first factor is based on the link flows at equilibrium. The higher the link flow, higher is the importance of that link. The second factor is based on the importance of facilities served. Higher the number of important facilities served, higher is the weightage. The third factor is based on the number of origin-destination pairs served by a link. The proposed methodology is first demonstrated with a small test network and then its validity for practice is tested with real scale transportation network. Sensitivity analysis is performed using various budget scenarios and it is found that with the increase in budget the ranking of critical links changes as expected. Proposed methodology can be a helpful tool for practitioners and decision-makers in prioritizing maintenance investments for road transport network under constrained budget.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADA50 Standing Committee on Transportation Programming and Investment Decision-Making.

01618707

17-02429

English

19p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Highway transportation; Multiple criteria decision making; Network links; Networks; Sensitivity analysis; Traffic flow; Travel time

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-02429

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 10:54AM