Title: A hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm for solving real-life transportation network design problems

Authors: Saeed Asadi Bagloee; Madjid Tavana; Avishai Ceder; Claire Bozic; Mohsen Asadi

Addresses: Parsons, 2nd Floor, Gulf Tower b, Oud Metha Rd., P.O. Box 9123, Dubai, UAE ' Business Systems and Analytics, La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA 19141, USA ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Auckland, 20 Symonds Street, Auckland 1142, New Zealand ' Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, 233 S. Wacker Drive Suite 800, Chicago IL 60606, USA ' Kharazmi University, P.O. Box 15614, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: The network-design problem (NDP) has a wide range of applications in transportation, telecommunications, and logistics. The idea is to efficiently design a network of links (roads, optical fibres, etc.) enabling the flow of commodities (drivers, data packets, etc.) to satisfy demand characteristics. Various exact and heuristic methods such as branch and bound, Tabu search, genetic algorithm (GA), ant system (AS) have been developed to address the NDP which is a highly intractable combinatorial problem. The literature has yet to address the NDP in real-size networks. In this study, we propose a new meta-heuristic algorithm for solving large NDPs by hybridising GA and AS methods. The applicability of the proposed meta-heuristic approach to real-size networks is demonstrated at two different sites. First, we use a large real-life problem for the city of Winnipeg, Canada and show that our heuristic method produces exact solutions very efficiently. Second, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm using the data of Sioux Falls (a benchmark in the literature). While the proposed approach produces solutions similar to the other available methods in the literature, it is superior for developing solutions in large-size NDPs.

Keywords: hybrid metaheuristics; transport networks; network design; ant system; genetic algorithms; GAs; Canada; ant colony optimisation; ACO.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2013.055561

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2013 Vol.16 No.1, pp.41 - 66

Published online: 26 Dec 2013 *

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