Optimizing facility siting for probabilistic collection and distribution of information in support of urban transportation

Abstract

Collecting and receiving information about the state of a transportation system is essential to effective planning for intelligent transportation systems, whether it be on the part of individual users or managers of the system. However, efforts to collect or convey information about a system’s status often require considerable investment in infrastructure/technology. Moreover, given variations in the development and use of transportation systems over time, uncertainties exist as to where and when demand for such services may be needed. To address these problems, a model for minimizing the cost of siting and/or collecting information while ensuring specified levels of demand are served at an acceptable level of reliability is proposed. To demonstrate the characteristics of the proposed formulation, it is coupled with another planning objective and applied to identify optimal sites for information provision/collection in a transportation system. Model solutions are then derived for multiple scenarios of system flow to explore how variations in the use of a transportation system can impact siting configurations.