Location and Capacity Modeling of Network Interchanges

• Main Author: Fabregas, Aldo D.
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2013
• Subjects: bi-level programming; network design problem; Stackelberg games; traffic equilibrium; transportation planning; Operational Research; Statistics and Probability; Urban Studies and Planning
• Online Access: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4318; http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5514&context=etd

Network design decisions, especially those pertaining to urban infrastructure, are made by a central authority or network leader, and taking into consideration the network users or followers. These network decision problems are formulated as non-linear bi-level programming problems. In this work, a continuous network design problem (CNDP) and discrete network design problem (DNDP) bi-level optimization programs are proposed and solved in the context of transportation planning. The solution strategy involved reformulation and linearization as a single-level program by introducing the optimality conditions of the lower level problem into the upper level problem. For the CNDP, an alternative linearization algorithm (modified least squares partitioning, MLSPA) is proposed. MLSPA takes into consideration the current arc capacity and potential expansion to find a reduced set of planes to generalize the flow-capacity surface behavior. The concepts of flow capacity surface was introduced as a way to model of congested network and capture the effect of capacity on travel time/cost. It was found that the quality of the linear approximation depends on the goodness of fit the bottleneck arcs. The proposed approach was tested with well-known benchmark problems in transportation which yielded promising results in terms of efficiency, without sacrificing solution quality.