Sustainable Routing Guidance for a Road Network with Work Zones During the Connected and Automated Vehicles Era
Abstract
Emerging technologies in transportation engineering including connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) exhibit much potential to solve a variety of persistent problems that have impaired the safety and mobility performance of transportation systems. A well-known context of such problems is the construction work zone where agencies have grappled with solutions that range from no closure, partial closure to full closure of road sections during construction, rehabilitation, or maintenance work. Road agencies also seek to develop and implement such workzone plans in a manner that does not unduly jeopardize the economic, social and environmental resources of the road users and the community where the workzone is located. In order to ensure that these three components of sustainable development are attained during road construction workzone management, road agencies seek to develop and implement tools that they can use to guide road users in a network to minimize overall delay, emissions, and fuel consumption. This thesis examines this specific context of highway administration. The thesis developed detour routing guidance for the road users in a road network with work zones in case of full closure, in a manner that is consistent with sustainable development. The research did this for the Automated vehicles (this unlikely scenario is merely considered to demonstrate the potential of connectivity in the network) and the era of connected and automated vehicles. In doing this, the thesis identified the potential benefits that CAV technology can offer in sustainable systemwide management of road work zones. The thesis considered the following sustainability-related evaluation criteria: economic (accessibility to businesses, user costs of fuel consumption, and user costs of travel delay; social (rapid access by emergency services such as ambulance); and environmental (noise pollution and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions). The routing optimization was modeled as a linear programming problem and numerical experiments were carried out. The road network of Sioux Falls city was used to demonstrate the study results. The results suggest that the developed optimal sustainable routing scheme yielded significant improvement in terms of the sustainability criteria while maintaining the acceptable levels of service The results also provided insights on the prospective benefits of routing schemes developed via system optimal management (achieved through centrally-guided detour movements that is facilitated by CAV technology) vis-à-vis user equilibrium management, specifically, Nash Equilibrium.
Degree
M.Sc.
Advisors
Labi, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Civil engineering|Sustainability|Transportation
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