A sustainable approach for selecting and timing the urban transportation infrastructure projects in large-scale networks: A case study of Isfahan, Iran

Decision making about transportation infrastructure projects is one of the important issues in transportation planning, especially in developing cities. Transportation authorities need a systematic approach to determine which projects should be selected from a set of candidate projects and when the selected projects should be carried out. In this paper, a new approach is proposed by which selecting and timing urban transportation projects is done simultaneously. A bi-level mathematical programming model is presented and a two-phase hybrid solution procedure is developed. The presented approach has two prominent features. First, it is capable of considering large transportation networks with many candidate projects. Second, it selects and schedules projects based on sustainable development. To verify the efficiency of the suggested approach, Isfahan transportation network is selected as the case study, and 31 road projects (construction and widening) along with 12 Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects are scheduled for a 10-year planning horizon (2016-2026). It was found that the proposed approach can effectively solve network development planning problem of large transportation networks with many projects.