Optimization of Transportation Infrastructure System Performance with Autonomous Maintenance Technology in Work Zones

Work zones maintenance are essential to the efficiency and safety of transportation system. However, frequent accidents have always been a great threat to the safety of public and roadway maintenance engineers in the nation’s work zones. State DOTs have been committed to reducing fatalities of DOTs engineers by developing and applying advanced technologies. A recent technology named autonomous maintenance technology (AMT) is gaining rapid attention to eliminate fatalities of Department of Transportation (DOT) employees in work zones. Research shows that promising results are observed in current testing and deployments in multiple States.

This project aims to support DOT decision-makers to determine, with limited budget, how to maximize the maintenance benefit. It is generally known that as the link performance function (LPF, such as free flow travel time or roadway capacity) is updated after maintenance, the traffic flow will redistribute in the network, and thus the equilibrium travel time (ETT) will change accordingly. We use an extreme example of Braess’s paradox for illustration purpose, in which adding or improving one roadway segment may actually lead to a worse traffic condition.

Determining maintenance priority becomes an important problem for DOT to maximize the maintenance benefit, with limited budget. The key to deal with this problem is the quantification of marginal benefit of maintaining one roadway segment. To this end, user equilibrium (UE) model will be developed to model the transportation system dynamics. A bush-based algorithm will be developed first to solve the UE traffic assignment. Sensitivity analysis will then be conducted to compute the marginal cost of ETT. Last but not the least, maintenance priority will be suggested to DOT to avoid the Braess’s paradox and maximize the transportation infrastructure system performance.

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