Planning of optimum highway work zones (ASTRA2006/007)
Overview
Background & policy context:
The main purpose of highway maintenance is to ensure safe and convenient movement of people and goods on highway networks. The functioning, well maintained highway network spans urban areas and is instrumental in creation of added value in Switzerland. However, maintenance actions can cause traffic congestion with considerable negative impact on road users and thus inducing societal costs. Recognising this issue a highway agency strives to minimise both agency and society costs by methodic planning of highway work zones.
Objectives:
The objective of this research is the development of a method to determine optimal highway work zones for a road segment. The optimal work zone is understood to minimise overall costs within a time period, i. e. agency costs based on live-cycle cost analysis and the costs due to detrimental impact of maintenance activities on road users and environment. Furthermore the potential and limits of the proposed method are identified by applying it to two real world examples on the Swiss highway network.
Methodology:
Both the conservation measures as well as their interventions and impact on the traffic flow are quantified monetarily.
The situation of the transport system is generally modeled as a schematic network. The individual objects (road sections, engineering structures, technical facilities and equipment) are in terms of coordinates (linear) via kilometer distances related to each other. The object is defined as a distance between two points on the network.
The derivation of the economically optimal construction site (follow measures and implementation time points) requires the evaluation of all possible variants of types of measures / implementation times for the lowest total cost.
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