Highway maintenance usually disrupts traffic flow and causes traffic congestion. Transportation agencies are facing increasing pressure to reduce construction time and alleviate the impact to traveling public and local businesses. However, accelerated construction and compressed schedule are expensive. The objective of this study is to optimize work zone schedule. The objective total cost, including agency and road user costs, is minimized considering a discrete maintenance time-cost relation. A Genetic Algorithm is developed to solve the combinatorial, multi-dimensional optimization problem. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the solution methodology. Sensitivity analysis is conducted, which explores the relation between decision variables and model parameters.
Abstract