Copyright © 2012 Qun Chen and Feng Shi. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The idea of microcirculation transportation was proposed to shunt heavy traffic on arterial roads through branch roads. The optimization model for designing micro-circulation transportation network was developed to pick out branch roads as traffic-shunting channels and determine their required capacity, trying to minimize the total reconstruction expense and land occupancy subject to saturation and reconstruction space constraints, while accounting for the route choice behaviour of network users. Since micro-circulation transportation network design problem includes both discrete and continuous variables, a discretization method was developed to convert two groups of variables (discrete variables and continuous variables) into one group of new discrete variables, transforming the mixed network design problem into a new kind of discrete network design problem with multiple values. The genetic algorithm was proposed to solve the new discrete network design problem. Finally a numerical example demonstrated the efficiency of the model and algorithm.