Iterative algorithm for lane reservation problem on transportation network

In this paper, we study an NP-hard lane reservation problem on transportation network. By selecting lanes to be reserved on the existing transportation network under some special situations, the transportation tasks can be accomplished on the reserved lanes with satisfying the condition of time or safety. Lane reservation strategy is a flexible and economic method for traffic management. However, reserving lanes has impact on the normal traffic because the reserved lanes can only be passed by the special tasks. It should be well considered choosing reserved lanes to minimize the total traffic impact when applying the lane reservation strategy for the transportation tasks. In this paper, an integer linear program model is formulated for the considered problem and an optimal algorithm based on the cut-and-solve method is proposed. Some new techniques are developed for the cut-and-solve method to accelerate the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Numerical computation results of 125 randomly generated instances show that the proposed algorithm is much faster than a MIP solver of commercial software CPLEX 12.1 to find optimal solutions on average computing time.