CEE Seminar (ZOOM): Post-disaster Recovery Sequencing Strategy for Road Networks

Abstract: Natural disasters cause significant disruption in road networks, rendering many crucial links unusable. To prioritize repairs of these links, we investigate how to identify a link repair sequence that minimizes total travel time over the repair horizon, given that at each repair stage road traffic distributes according to the principle of user equilibrium. We derive an analogue of Bellman’s optimality principle, allowing us to solve the problem using methods of dynamic programming. We specifically develop a bidirectional search heuristic with customized pruning and branching strategies that exploit specific properties of traffic assignment. Our experiments show that our method is scalable and performs well even on networks involving thousands of links.

Bio: Stephen Boyles is an associate professor in transportation engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and a recognized expert in transportation network modeling and the application of mathematical optimization techniques to transportation problems. He earned bachelor's degrees in mathematics and civil engineering from the University of Washington in 2004, and a master's degree and doctorate in civil engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2006 and 2009, respectively. His research interests include static and dynamic traffic assignment, network models for urban parking, multiscale network modeling and planning for innovative vehicle technologies (such as electric or autonomous vehicles)