Two-way road network design problem with variable lanes

This paper studies a new form of transportation network design problem. In urban transportation network, unreasonable phenomenon can occur in certain traffic period (e.g. on/off duty period), which demonstrates that the flows of opposite directions on a two-way road are seriously asymmetric; one traffic link of a two-way road congest heavily but the other is hardly used. In order to reduce transportation congestion and make full use of the existing road resources, we propose a lane reallocating approach in peak period, and establish a discrete bi-level programming model for the decision-making. Then, based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique, a heuristic solution algorithm for the bi-level model is designed. Finally, the lane reallocating approach is demonstrated through a simple transportation network. This work was supported in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 70631001, 70481088 and 70671008, and by Doctoral Station Grant No.(20050004005) of Ministry of Education, China. Haozhi Zhang, now doing Ph.D. on systems analysis and integration under the direction of Prof. Z.Y. Gao. His research interests focus on transportation network design, transportation land use, traffic pollution control. Ziyou Gao, Professor and Ph.D. Doctoral Advisor, received his Ph.D. from Institute of Applied Mathematics of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993. His interests cover theories and methods of optimization and operations research, transportation planning and management.