Topological Effects and Performance Optimization in Transportation Continuous Network Design

Because of the limitation of budget, in the planning of road works, increased efforts should be made on links that are more critical to the whole traffic system. Therefore, it would be helpful to model and evaluate the vulnerability and reliability of the transportation network when the network design is processing. This paper proposes a bilevel transportation network design model, in which the upper level is to minimize the performance of the network under the given budgets, while the lower level is a typical user equilibrium assignment problem. A new solution approach based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) method is presented. The topological effects on the performance of transportation networks are studied with the consideration of three typical networks, regular lattice, random graph, and small-world network. Numerical examples and simulations are presented to demonstrate the proposed model.