Finding the Most Reliable Strategy on Stochastic and Time-Dependent Transportation Networks: A Hypergraph Based Formulation

This study addresses the problem of determining the most reliable time-adaptive strategy on a stochastic and time-dependent transportation network. The reliability is measured as a conic combination of the mean and standard-deviation of travel time and is termed robust-cost. The stochastic time-dependent network is represented as a directed acyclic hypergraph, where the time-adaptive strategies correspond to the hyperpaths. This representation transforms the problem to that of determining the hyperpath with the least robust-cost on the constructed hypergraph. The minimum robust-cost strategy problem is difficult to solve because of the non-linear objective function. Consequently, the solution procedures commonly adopted in the literature —that are based on substrategy optimality and substrategy non-dominance —are not applicable to this problem. In this light, we propose a novel bounds-based iterative algorithm that determines the minimum robust-cost strategy on the stochastic and time-dependent networks. This algorithm needs to determine the least and K-best strategies in the second moment of travel time, for which an efficient procedure is also proposed. The algorithm is shown to be exact and exhibit parameterically polynomial behavior; computational tests were performed to demonstrate its efficiency. Further, tests showed that the minimum robust-cost strategy compromises little in terms of the mean travel time (0.2%–2.9%) —compared to least expected travel time strategy— with significant reduction in travel time variability (6.2%–29.8%).