Alleviating morning commute congestion through school start time optimization: An exhaustive search approach

Abstract: One of the major causes of road Traffic congestion in urban transportation networks during the morning rush hour can be attributed to the fact that schools start at the same time. In a modern city center, a large portion of commuters need to drop off their children at school before going to work. When the schools start at the same time, commuters pursuing school-related trips enter the network simultaneously, creating a high demand that the network cannot directly accommodate, resulting in performance degradation. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose a novel approach that regulates the start time of schools, anticipating the emergence of congestion during the morning commute. We consider regional Traffic dynamics to capture the movement of vehicles in the urban network through the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram. The related problem is formulated as a bi-objective mixed integer nonlinear program whose target is to jointly minimize i) the total time spent by all vehicles inside the network and ii) the associated overall delay observed between the initial and the shifted start time of each school located in the urban network. Dealing with such optimization problems is challenging due to their combinatorial and non-convex nature. To this end, we develop an Exhaustive Search Algorithm, which pinpoints the school start time pair that minimizes the total time spent objective metric. We demonstrate that by properly selecting the school start time, we can shift the peak demand to less congested periods and, as a result, alleviate congestion.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 739551 (KIOS CoE) and from the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programs, Coordination and Development.

Antonios Georgantas is partially supported by the Foundation for Education and European Culture, Founders Nicos and Lydia Tricha, Greece.