The steady growth in travel demand, accelerated deterioration of highway facility conditions, and increased concerns over mobility, safety, and the environment have put an intensified pressure to transportation agencies in seeking cost-effective investment decisions to uphold highway system performance. This paper first discusses the characteristics of highway project selection and reviews methods that exist in the literature for highway project selection. It then presents a stochastic optimization model, along with an efficient solution algorithm, developed to facilitate the implementation of contract-based, corridor-based, and deferment-based tradeoff methods for project selection. A case study is performed to assess the impacts of adopting different tradeoff methods on the investment decision outcomes. Cross comparisons reveal that significant changes in the investment decision outcomes could be resulted from the use of different tradeoff methods for project selection. The proposed methodology could be adopted by transportation agencies to improve the efficiency of investment decision-making.
Abstract