Discrete design of urban road networks with meta-heuristic Harmony Search algorithm

Abstract

In this study, the discrete design of urban transportation networks is formulated as a nonlinear mixed integer programming problem and solved with meta-heuristic Harmony Search (HS) optimization technique. The traffic assignment problem, which represents the distribution of the traffic flows on the road network, is solved under user equilibrium manner using Generalized Reduced Gradient (GRG) method. The investment strategy, which minimizes total travel time on the network, is determined by considering the available budget. The proposed method is applied on two well-known example road networks in the literature. Results showed that the meta-heuristic HS based solution method could effectively be used for discrete design of urban transportation networks and the system performance of the road network, which is solved with this method, is improved about 16%.