An Optimization Method of Transportation Network Design Based on the Concept of Sustainable Development

Traffic congestion, energy shortcoming and environment pollution are nowadays the common problems faced by many metropolises and which have severely restricted the further development of these cities. Therefore, the sustainable development of an urban transportation system has aroused more and more attention. Based on this background, this paper attempts to investigate the transportation network design problem from the perspective of sustainable development, and focuses on the impacts of road broadening on total travel time, total fuel consumption, and total vehicular emission at the network level. The authors integrate these three indicators into a sustainable development index, and then establish the corresponding bi-level optimization model. The upper level problem is to maximize the sustainable development index from the viewpoint of traffic managers, and the lower level problem is to depict travelers' route choice behavior based on user equilibrium (UE) theory. Finally, the genetic algorithm is used to solve the bi-level model. The numerical example shows that the model and algorithm are feasible and can be taken as a basis for the related research.