365-day sectional work zone schedule optimization for road networks considering economies of scale and user cost

This study proposes a methodology for deriving the optimal work zone schedule for the annual routine maintenance planning in an infrastructure asset management system considering the (i) economies of scale in work zone costs due to work zone synchronization and (ii) user costs across the road network with traffic assignments. A key aspect of the proposed methodology is the ability to derive in detail optimal work zone schedules of realistic-scale road networks in 100 m sections for 365 days, which is beneficial in practice. To this end, an optimization model of the work zone schedule is newly formulated as a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem, and a novel bilevel solution method for the model utilizing the conventional solver Gurobi Optimizer with MIP algorithms such as root relaxation, dual simplex, barrier methods, and cutting planes is proposed. In application examples, the proposed methodology is applied to two real-world road networks, which confirms that the optimal work zone schedule can be obtained in 313.7 s for a network with 2640, 100 m, sections and in 168,180 s (46 h and 43 min) for a network with 5038, 100 m, sections.