Algorithm for the Planning of Optimum Highway Work Zones

Work zones often cause traffic congestion on high volume roads. As traffic volumes increase so does work zone-related traffic congestion and so does the public demand for road agencies to decrease both their number and duration. Negative impacts on road users can be minimized by bundling interventions on several interconnected road sections instead of treating each road section separately. Negative impacts on road users can be quantified in user costs. The optimum work zone is the one that results in the minimum overall agency and user costs. The minimization of these costs is often the goal of corridor planning. In order to achieve this goal the interventions on each asset type (pavement, bridges, tunnels, hardware, etc.) must be bundled into optimum packages. In this paper a method is presented that enables road agencies to determine optimum work zones and intervention packages. The method allows the consideration of both budget constraints and distance constraints, including maximum permissible work zone length or minimum distance between work zones. The mathematical formulation of this optimization problem is a binary program that can be solved by existing techniques (i.e., the branch-and-bound method). The feasibility of the approach is illustrated with a simple example.