An activity-based approach for optimization of land use and transportation network development

This paper tentatively makes use of an activity-based approach to investigate the optimization problem of land use allocation and transportation network enhancement, in which the budget for investment and some other constraints are given for the purpose of sustainable urban development. To make investigation on residential and employment development as well as road link capacity expansions for short-term strategic planning purpose, a new bi-level programming model is proposed to capture the interactions between land use and transportation network development together with their impacts on activity-travel choice behaviors. The lower level of the proposed model is used to model the choice behavior of commuters on activity chain, departure time, path and activity scheduling duration simultaneously over the time of day, while the upper level is to maximize the population allocation and network enhancement subject to a set of given constraints. A heuristic solution method is developed to solve the proposed bi-level model. Finally, two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed model and solution algorithm together with some insightful findings.