Optimal lane reservation via new optimization model and heuristic algorithm

This paper studies a transportation planning problem called capacitated lane reservation problem (CLRP). It focuses on designing time-efficient paths for a set of transportation tasks by choosing lanes from the network to be reserved while respecting the road residual capacity. For the special tasks, lane reservation increases their transportation efficiency, while for general-purpose vehicles on adjacent non-reserved lanes, travel delay may be caused. The objective of CLRP is to minimize such negative impact via optimal lane reservation. For this problem, we develop an improved model and an efficient heuristic. Results of extensive numerical experiments on benchmark instances show the efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm.