A study on lane reservation problems in transportation networks

Overview & Synopsis

Nowadays, transportation has become an indispensable part in modern life. However, heavy traffic congestion due to high urbanization and rapid increase of vehicles has caused low transportation efficiency and huge amounts of urban pollution. In this context, to meet special transportation requirements and improve the performance of transportation systems, lane reservation, as a flexible and economic traffic management strategy, has been widely implemented in real life. The majority of studies about lane reservation in the literature focus on the impact at a microscope level, e.g., a single link or corridor.In this thesis, we focus on optimally reserving lanes at a macroscopic network level with the objective of minimizing negative impact for two categories of problems. We firstly investigate the large-size and robust lane reservation problems in the contexts of future automated truck freight transportation and large-scale special events. Then, we study lane reservation for improving the performance of bus transit system under different assumptions. For all problems studied in this thesis, appropriate models are provided and their complexities are analyzed. Different resolution approaches are developed according to the characteristics of problems, including exact two-phase method, exact epsilon-constraint based method, cut-and-solve method, and kernel search method. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated by benchmark and randomly generated instances. Extensive numerical experiments show the proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms and the commercial software CPLEX.