A Two-Stage Model for Project Optimization in Transportation Infrastructure Management System

Abstract

Mathematical optimization is very important for project decision in the Transportation Infrastructure Management System (TIMS). However, it has not been widely employed in TIMS due to poor performance of conventional optimization models in calculation speed and practical application. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the performance of optimization models. According to the process of decision-making in transportation management, a novel two-stage project optimization model, including budget allocation and project distribution, was proposed in this paper. Moreover, the methods of dynamic programming (DP) and genetic algorithm (GA) were applied to obtain an effective solution. The findings indicate that the new optimization method can provide a satisfactory and reasonable maintenance schedule for transportation infrastructure maintenance agencies whose routine management will benefit from the newly proposed model.