Heuristic for lane reservation problem in time constrained transportation

This paper addresses a new transportation problem called lane reservation problem in time constrained transportation. It originates from large sportive events in a city or region where the travel time between sportive villages and stadium should fall in a strict time window. To guarantee the timely transportation in an already traffic saturated city, the problem consists in temporarily creating special lanes on roads in the transportation network. The objective is to minimize the total weighted cost of reserved lanes so as to minimize the traffic impact to the normal traffic situation. In this paper, this problem is formulated as an integer linear programming model. An efficient heuristic is presented to obtain near optimal solutions due to the complexity of the problem. Numerical results show that the average gap between solutions obtained by the proposed heuristic and that by a software package (Lingo 8.0) is less than 1.59% for small size instances, while the average computational time with the heuristic is less than one second. As a case study, the proposed heuristic is applied to the transportation planning in Guangzhou Asian Games.