Method of Programming Regional Highway Projects

Abstract

This paper presents an integer programming formulation and heuristic solution procedure for programming regional highway projects. The objective is to determine an optimal program of projects over a multi‐period planning horizon that is feasible within yearly budget constraints and also satisfies a set of regional funding requirements. While each budget constraint places an upper bound on yearly expenditures across all regions, the regional funding requirements establish minimum subarea allocations that have been prespecified on the basis of a funding formula. Since this type of problem can be quite large, a heuristic solution procedure is described that provides an effective means of finding good solutions to these problems with relatively little computational effort and implementation difficulty. The procedure is shown to obtain objective function values that lie within 7% of the best values obtained from an optimization package for several example problems. In addition to seeking further refinements to the solution technique, future research should be concerned with the proper specification of project costs and benefits, and of regional funding formulas, which are two issues not addressed in this paper.