Optimization models for assessing the peak capacity utilization of intelligent transportation systems

With limited economic and physical resources, it is not feasible to continually expand transportation infrastructure to adequately support the rapid growth in its usage. This is especially true for traffic coordination systems where the expansion of road infrastructure has not been able to keep pace with the increasing number of vehicles, thereby resulting in congestion and delays. Hence, in addition to striving for the construction of new roads, it is imperative to develop new intelligent transportation management and coordination systems. The effectiveness of a new technique can be evaluated by comparing it with the optimal capacity utilization. If this comparison indicates that substantial improvements are possible, then the cost of developing and deploying an intelligent traffic system can be justified. Moreover, developing an optimization model can also help in capacity planning. For instance, at a given level of demand, if the optimal solution worsens significantly, this implies that no amount of intelligent strategies can handle this demand, and expanding the infrastructure would be the only alternative. In this paper, we demonstrate these concepts through a case study of scheduling vehicles on a grid of intersecting roads. We develop two optimization models namely, the mixed integer programming model and the space–time network flow model, and show that the latter model is substantially more effective. Moreover, we prove that the problem is strongly NP‐hard and develop two polynomial‐time heuristics. The heuristic solutions are then compared with the optimal capacity utilization obtained using the space–time network model. We also present important managerial implications.