Project 4.7 (2019)
Background
At any time, there are many pavement upgrades that are needed across the Melbourne metropolitan region. Each upgrade causes some disruption – reducing the capacity of a road to fewer lanes, or a single lane with traffic signals, or even a complete road closure. Each disruption has consequences for congestion on the surrounding area. Each upgrade also requires resources and incurs costs, but the pool of resources and the available budget are both limited at any time. Finally, different upgrades have different urgency, and potentially may need to be completed before a deadline.
The challenge is to plan all the upgrades such that sufficient resources are available, the budget is not exceeded, the urgent upgrades are scheduled in due time and disruption is minimised. For example, multiple upgrades along the alternative routes connecting major centres should not be executed at the same time; but on the other hand, multiple upgrades along a single route should preferably be synchronised.
Project Objectives
The aim of this project is to optimise the scheduling of pavement upgrades so as to:
- minimise the disruption to traffic across the Melbourne road network
- ensure upgrades are completed in time
- match the work scheduled to the equipment and available appropriately skilled people
- Professor Mark Wallace (LCI - Monash University)
- Professor Hai Vu (Monash University)
- Professor Sujeeva Setunge (RMIT University)
