Civil Engineering - Theses
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ItemRoad space optimisation for multiclass and multimodal traffic networks( 2017)Traffic congestion has become a serious concern and hindrance to the prosperity of many societies. Among a variety of solutions two approaches are of significant importance: constructing new roads and bridges to ease traffic congestion and promoting public transport. For the latter, the aim is to provide more space in the heart of cities for public transport (buses, trams, etc) aiming to get more commuters to their destinations. Therefore, two central questions have been addressed in this research; (i) investment in the road construction: given a number of candidate projects associated with construction expenses and a limited budget, what is the best choice of projects. This is known as the road network design problem (NDP), and (ii) transit priority lanes: given a road network, which roads should be selected to provide a lane to be exclusively used by public transport modes such that the overall performance of the transport system is not adversely affected. This problem is called the, “transit priority lane design problem” (TPLDP). For the former, (NDP) a hybridized method consisting of the branch and bound algorithm and Benders decomposition method has been developed. For the latter (TPLDP), the concept of Braess paradox was employed to seek for “mis-utilized” space in congested networks to be utilized by public transport. To this end, a merit index aiming to spot potentially some Braess-tainted roads is introduced first. Then a branch and bound algorithm was developed to find the best subset of the Braess tainted roads that have no adverse impact on the overall performance of the network. This study advances the state of knowledge in the above mentioned problems in five areas: (i) the authenticity of the traffic model is enhanced by subjecting all the analysis to multimodal and multiclass traffic circulation, (ii) the methodologies developed in this study are tailored to real world applications as illustrated with numerical analysis, (iii) a RAM-efficient branch and bound algorithm (BB) has been developed such that the expansion of the BB’s tree structure becomes memoryless, (iv) inclusion of the Braess paradox in the pursuit of the transit priority lane would nullify possible adverse effects on the private modes, and (v) a new method for the capacitated traffic assignment has been developed which is called inflated travel time.