01340236

Component

With the increasing scope of maintenance projects and travel demand, transportation agencies face great challenges in developing effective comprehensive work zone management plans which can efficiently mitigate the negative impacts of reduced road space on traffic mobility and safety. To ease designer’s work load, this paper developed an optimization model to find the best combination of the major components of a work zone management plan, including the timing, duration, and configuration of lane closures as well as selection of various traffic impact mitigation strategies, such as detour plan. Considering the fact that drivers’ diversion behavior may vary considerably under different circumstances, the optimization model embeds three models for predicting time-varying detour rates, including System Optimization Model (SO), User Equilibrium Model (UE), and Logit-based Route Choice Model (RC). A heuristic optimization algorithm, named two-stage modified population-based simulated annealing (2PBSA), is designed to search for a near-optimal solution. The application of this proposed methodology is demonstrated through a hypothetical resurfacing project on a hypothetical maintenance project on the United States Route I-95 north bound in Maryland. Through the numerical experiments, the authors found that detour control, combing with efficient lane closure tactics, has great potential to mitigate the traffic impact and reduce project cost. Its effectiveness highly depends on road users’ detour behavior as well as the physical and traffic characteristics of the mainline and alternative routes.

01329018

11-4175

English

32p

2011

Transportation Research Board 90th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (18) ; Tables (11)

Highway operations; Lane closure; Mobility; Optimization; Route choice; Simulated annealing; Traffic characteristics; Traffic safety; Work zone safety; Work zone traffic control

Interstate 95

System optimal models; Traffic impact analysis

Maryland

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2011 Paper #11-4175

TRIS, TRB

Feb 17 2011 6:46PM