Optimizing Highway Grades to Minimize Cost and Maintain Traffic Speed
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 127, Issue 4
Abstract
In practice, the task of designing the vertical alignment of a highway is done manually by an experienced engineer. As a result, the work is both time and resource consuming and relies heavily on human expertise. This work presents a mathematical model that solves for a set of optimal highway vertical grades for a given horizontal alignment. In addition to construction costs, facts considered by this model include earthwork balance and traffic speed in both directions. Code requirements and design practice are also considered. A three-layered heuristic is developed to solve the model. In the first layer, a neighborhood search heuristic is used to determine the locations where grade can change. The second layer sets penalty terms for sections where speed is undesirable, and the third layer solves a mixed integer program that has very few or no 0-1 integer variables. Computational testing on a 2-km road segment shows that the model yields good solutions.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
1.
American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). ( 1994). A policy on geometric design of highways and streets, Washington, D.C.
2.
Chew, E. P., Goh, C. J., and Fwa, T. F. ( 1989). “Simultaneous optimization of horizontal and vertical alignments for highways.” Transp. Res., 23B(5), 315–329.
3.
Easa, S. M. ( 1988). “Selection of roadway grades that minimize earthwork cost using linear programming.” Transp. Res., 22A(2), 121– 136.
4.
Goh, C. J., Chew, E. P., and Fwa, T. F. ( 1988). “Discrete and continuous models for computation of optimal vertical highway alignment.” Transp. Res., 22B(5), 399–409.
5.
Glover, F. ( 1989). “Tabu search, Part I.” ORSA J. on Comp., 1(3), 190–206.
6.
Glover, F. ( 1990). “Tabu search, Part II.” ORSA J. on Comp., 2(1), 4–32.
7.
Hayman, R. W. ( 1970). “Optimization of vertical alignment for highways through mathematical programming.” Hwy. Res. Rec. 306, Highway Research Board, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., 1–9.
8.
Kirkpatrick, S., Gelatt, C. D., and Vecchi, M. P. ( 1983). “Optimization by simulated annealing.” Sci., 220, 671–680.
9.
Moreb, A. A. ( 1996). “Linear programming model for finding optimal roadway grades that minimize earthwork cost.” Eur. J. Operational Res., 93(1), 148–154.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Transportation Engineering
Volume 127 • Issue 4 • August 2001
Pages: 303 - 310
History
Received: May 31, 2000
Published online: Aug 1, 2001
Published in print: Aug 2001
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.