Modeling and optimization of dedicated bus lane network design under dynamic traffic congestion

Abstract

Collective transport has been seen for long as a proper solution to fight congestion. While collectivity has been successful with respect to subways, it is not the norm in road traffic. Dedicated Bus Lanes (DBL) have been proposed as a measure to reduce the impact of traffic congestion in the travel time and accuracy of buses, by providing them with exclusive road space. However, DBL presence decreases road capacity, which may induce local congestion. Balancing this inherent trade-off of a DBL network, by carefully selecting the location of DBLs while considering the dynamics of congestion propagation is challenging. This work aims at finding a reliable modeling and optimization methodology to address this problem. An adjusted version of Store-and-Forward queuing model and microscopic simulation are used to simulate the traffic dynamics in presence of DBLs and assess the global network performance, while a local search algorithm is used to improve some state-of-practice solutions.