The coordination of street works activities in urban networks has been highlighted by the Government as one of the most important aspects of street works practice, benefiting street authorities, undertakers and road users alike (Department for Transport, 2012c). The present research aims to develop an optimisation model for minimising the overall costs and disruptions incurred by all stakeholders as a result of implementing a number of street works schemes in an urban traffic network. The output of the optimisation model consists of optimum values for the underlying decision variables of the model such as start time of each street works scheme, type of traffic management strategy for each link, sequence of link closures and the level of resources allocated to undertake each scheme.
The following two distinct objective functions, which are subject to minimisation by the optimisation model, have been developed:
A primary objective function which captures the monetised effects of street works schemes such as cost of delays to road users, and cost of undertaking street works schemes.
A secondary objective function (developed as a fuzzy inference system) to capture the non-monetised disruptive effects of street works schemes. The fuzzy variables of this inference system correspond to the level of ‘accessibility degradation’ of the network links, ‘connectivity degradation’ of the origin-destinations of the network, and ‘time sensitivity’ of the disruptive events (i.e. street works schemes).
Next the street works optimisation problem was mathematically formulated as a bi-level optimisation programming problem, where the higher level problem is associated with minimising the aforementioned objective functions, and the lower level problem deals with predicting traffic flows, and thus the amount of delays incurred by the road users.
Subsequently this study developed a genetic algorithm solution method to solve the resulting non-convex and NP-hard optimisation problem with integer or mixed type variables. Finally the performance of the optimisation algorithm was verified by a number of experimental tests on a small hypothetical network for three street works schemes.
