A review of urban transportation network design problems

TLDR: This review intends to provide a bigger picture of transportation network design problems, allow comparisons of formulation approaches and solution methods of different problems in various classes of UTNDP, and encourage cross-fertilization between the RNDP and PTNDP research.

About: This article is published in European Journal of Operational Research.The article was published on 2013-09-01 and is currently open access. It has received 573 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Fuzzy transportation & Network planning and design.

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Table 4. A Summary on Time-Dependent Network Design Studies.

Table 7. A Summary of Case Studies in RNDP.

Table 8. A Summary of Case Studies in TNDP and TNDFSP.

Table 9. A Summary on Case Studies in MMNDP.

Table 3. A Summary on the Studies of Mixed Network Design Problems.

Table 6. A Summary on MMNDP studies.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "Review on urban transportation network design problems" ?

This paper presents a parsimonious review on the definitions, classifications, objectives, constraints, network topology decision variables, and solution methods of the Urban Transportation Network Design Problem ( UTNDP ), which includes both the Road Network Design Problem ( RNDP ) and the Public Transit Network Design Problem ( PTNDP ). The current trend and gap in each class of the problem are discussed and future directions in terms of both modeling and solution approaches are given. This review intends to give a bigger picture of transportation network design problems, allow comparisons of formulation approaches and solution methods of different problems in various classes of UTNDP, and encourage crossfertilization between the RNDP and PTNDP research. 

Q2. What have the authors stated for future works in "Review on urban transportation network design problems" ?

Therefore, one future direction can be to compare the performance of recently developed heuristics with genetic algorithm and the most commonly used algorithms to solve UTNDP. While other possibilities still remain to hybridize recently developed metaheuristics or to incorporate the strength of various well-known metaheuristics to solve UTNDP. Hence the incorporation of these considerations into solution algorithms is definitely one future direction. This alternative is rarely considered in TNDSP and should be considered in the future. 

Q3. What are the two types of traffic assignment?

Since there are two types of networks, namely road networks and transit networks, there are two types of trip assignment, namely traffic assignment and transit assignment, for determining the flow patterns in road and transit networks respectively. 

Q4. What is the main reason why DNDP is not considered in the strategic decision making?

Because demand and land use are changing over time, the consideration on the planning horizon is important to be considered in the strategic decision making. 

Q5. What did Zhang and Gao (2009) do to solve the bi-level problem?

Zhang and Gao (2009) reformulated MNDP as CNDP, and solved the bi-level model by the use of optimal-value function of the lower-level model in a gradient-based method. 

Q6. What is the common form of the problem in the road network category?

The most prevalent form of the lower level problem considers the route choice of the users, which is called the trip assignment problem. 

Q7. What are the common forms of traffic assignment in TNDP?

The most prevalent forms of traffic assignment in these problems are the DUE assignment with SUE and AON assignments as the other forms. 

Q8. What is the common category of solution algorithms?

A large amount of solution algorithms belong to the metaheuristics category and the few remaining algorithms are of exact and heuristic type methods. 

Q9. What software packages were used to solve the lower-level problem?

Some used simulation software packages such as NETSIM (Seo et al., 2005) and VISSIM (Elshafei et al., 2006) to solve the lower-level problem. 

Q10. What is the objective function and decision variable of the lower level problem?

f and v are, respectively, the objective function and decision variable (flow) vector of the lower level problem (L0), and g is a vector function in the lower level constraint. 

Q11. What is the common method of generating routes?

The configuration of routes is usually defined by selecting and improving the generated routes which is accompanied by line frequency determination where required. 

Q12. What is the problem that is ignored in these reviews?

the problem that considers the interaction between road and public transit network designs has been ignored in these reviews. 

Q13. Why is the number of related publications growing?

UTNDP has been continuously studied during the last 5 decades, and the number of related publications is growing over time probably because the problem is highly complicated, theoretically interesting, practically important, and multidisciplinary. 

Q14. What is the common method to solve the DUE assignment in the literature?

The most common method to solve DUE assignment in the literature is the convex-combination method (the Frank-Wolfe (1956) method) and its variants. 

Q15. What is the common method used to solve the SUE problem?

The most common algorithm applied in the literature to solve the SUE problem is the Method of Successive Averages (MSA) (e.g. Chen and Alfa, 1991; Zhang and Gao, 2007; Gallo et al., 2010; Long et al., 2010) based on flow averaging. 

Q16. How many small and medium sized networks were solved?

Drezner and Wesolowsky (1997) solved small and medium sized networks, the largest being a 40-nodes and 99-links randomly made network. 

Q17. Why have they been mostly applied to TNDFSP, DNDP, and MM?

This figure also reveals that metaheuristics have been mostly applied to TNDFSP, DNDP, and MMNDP, mainly because of the presence of discrete decision variables in these problems and their non-convexity which causes computational burden if exact methods were used. 

Q18. What is the simplest way to express the bilevel problem?

The above lower-level problem can be expressed as a variational inequality; in this case the bi-level network design problem can be formulated as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints. 

Q19. How did Mesbah and Beltran solve the mode split problem?

Mesbah et al. (2009) solved the mode split problem, traffic assignment and transit assignment in iterative steps until convergence was met, and Beltran et al. (2009) solved the mode split and equilibrium traffic and transit assignment problems in two iterations.