Highway maintenance is very expensive in terms of not only costs to the responsible agencies but also disruptive delays to users. Construction and maintenance activities on 2-lane, 2-way highways often require the closure of 1 lane. During certain periods of a day, the user delay associated with lane closure may be quite intolerable to motorists. In this work, a numerical method is developed to optimise work-zone scheduling and traffic control on 2-lane, 2-way highways where 1 lane at a time is closed. The aim is to minimize total cost, including maintenance, labour/equipment idle, and user-delay costs, considering traffic flows varying over time. The optimised variables and the sensitivity results generated from a numerical example are also presented. (Author/publisher)
Abstract