Sharif Digital Repository

Land-use and transportation are inter-related, such that land-use may be used to control transportation. This study aims to design a suitable combination of the residential and service land-use on one side, and the transportation system on the other side. The model presented in this study has two external and internal levels, and its objective is to minimize the cost of residence, receiving goods and services, and transportation. The performance of any combination of spatial allocation of population and employment, as well as transportation, is evaluated by the internal level of the model which determines the interaction between population, employment, and transportation. This is done by a... 

Natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, have been, and will be, one major source of mankind disastrous problems. Mankindinterventions to relieve this heavy pressure on humanity have been divided into four categories: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. This study is in the response phase, and aims to find an optimal network to help people in the devastated part of a city, hit by a major earthquake. Such earthquakes demolish buildings over the people inside, causing them fatal harm and serious injuries. At the same time, they ruin the city infrastructures (life lines), including transportation networks, preventing flow of relief supply to reach to the... 

This research deals with the joint problem of reopening the roads closed after a disastrous natural event and the damaged area relief programming. While these two problems are connected to each other by the joint resources of ruins and debris removal, they are usually treated separately in the literature, and their solutions are sought in practice by the art of experienced authorities. This study formulates a dynamic tri-level integer programming problem to represent the two problems of Road Reopening and Relief, in which the crisis manager has the objective of minimizing the death tolls over a planning time interval. It identifies the roads for reopening at the first level; and the second... 

Governments are concurrently faced with two problems in Network Development Problem (NDP): limited resources to invest, and the economic justification of the candidate projects. Public- Private Participation (PPP) is a solution for the first problem, in which Build- Operate- Transfer (BOT) is a scheme to implement this partnership.This study formulates a NDP, in which two sources of funds back projects’ construction: that of the private investor and the public budget for this purpose. The problem is seen as bi-level optimization, with the upper level dealing with the government decisions on the level of participation (from 0 to 100 percent of the project costs), and the lower level being a... 

Earthquake is one of the deadliest natural hazards that has taken more than 400 thousand lives, only in the last decade. Iran is one of the countries that are at high risk of potential death toll resulting from such hazards, firstly because it is located in a potentially high-risk zone, the so-called earthquake belt and, secondly because of its problems in the management of disastrous situations (especially, pre-disaster management). Bam 2003 earthquake is one of the most painful experiences in this context. So, in this research, emphasizing on the practical use of optimization models, an existing model is applied on the damaged area of the Bam earthquake. The mentioned model considers the... 

Relaxing the underlying assumptions of transportation networks analysis and approaching to more realistic behavioral assumptions in route choice modeling, allows more precise predictions for equilibrium traffic pattern. Furthermore, enhancing the degree of sensitivity in modeling traffic equilibrium is crucial from planning perspective in the sense that it can make transportation analyst capable to evaluate and predict the impacts of a broad spectrum of supply and demand management policies. This research has concentrated on proposing some generalizations in route choice behavior modeling and relaxing some restrictive assumptions of the previous approaches in this area. Formally speaking, in... 

Variations in supply and demand of transportation, as well as those in the related environment, would cause daily variations in user travel time of transportation networks. This phenomenon particularly happen in morning travel time peaks, and make estimation of travel time highly unreliable. Morning peak passengers, whose timely presence at the destinations are highly important to them, prefer to choose paths that have minimum travel time and maximum reliability. Thus, the look at travel time pessimistically, and based on their experience, they put a margin of reliability to reach at timely at their destinations.
This study analysis such reliability margins based on the standard... 

Long-term effects of natural disasters, like earthquakes, in many cases have been reported high on transportation networks. Disruption in this lifeline network's performance imposes high social and economic costs upon the society. Undoubtedly, retrofitting the structures of all network links (or constructing new links) are practically impossible and economically infeasible. One solution to this problem is finding a method for determining the network's important links, and retrofitting their structures. Based on this concept, an optimization problem of network performance improvement under these stochastic events is introduced. In this problem, a link importance index for network links is... 

Traffic is a major contributor to emissions in many large cities with severe air pollution. Experience in London, Milan, and Stockholm shows that charging for the use of roads can be effective in reducing emissions, as well as congestion. This study examines the use of predictive cordon tolls based on weather forecasts to reduce ambient air pollution and congestion. Travelers choose their destinations inside or outside the cordon, and whether to drive or take public transport. Passenger vehicles are divided into three classes according to their emission characteristics, and higher tolls are imposed on more polluting vehicles. The Box model of emission dispersion is used to predict air... 

This study is an endeavor to model the interaction between transportation and land use, as a constituent of a joint land use-network design problem defined in the context of transit oriented development (TOD). Population and employment follow a Garin-Lowry model; the endogenously determined transportation demand is administered by a joint mode choice-assignment model; and mode choice is governed by a logit model. Equilibrium of population choice of place of residence, employment choice of place of retailing, and passenger choice of mode and path, are all governed by a maximum utility principle. An algorithm is devised to reach these equilibrium states by an evolutionary process, whose engine... 

Road construction and maintenance constitute a significant part of country-wide infrastructure development budget each year. This indicates the importance of planning and design of individual road alignment in reducing the development cost. This study presents a meta-heuristic algorithm based on the concept of electromagnetism, which explores and finds a good route between two given points within a three-dimensional (3-D) context. It defines the region in a continuous 3-D surface, identifies initial routes, which are directed and shaped toward better positions by the help of local and global search. The final good solution is fine-tuned to produce a better alignment. The behaviour of the... 

Natural disasters take many lives each year and leave many others homeless, thereby occupy governments to restore previous conditions rather than deal with progress. Iran has also a worrisome record of natural disasters, and the unpreparedness of the parties involved turn each of such event into a disaster. The purpose of this study is to estimate more accurately the outcomes of severe earthquakes, and show its effect on the decisions which are made to mitigate them. The losses are classified into three groups of immediate, short-run and long-run, which are then measured by some common quantities. Using the 2003 Bam Earthquake as a reference, these quantities are used to measure the... 

Traffic volume is the most important characteristic in most traffic studies, which is regularly measured by sampling methods for a given road. Traffic volume has determining effect in specifying network origin-destination demand, improvement of roads, traffic distributions over the network, improving road parameters, air pollution and in other aspects of flow in the network. There are many ways to measure traffic volume in different situations. However, most of them are expensive to implement and in cases which take a long time to do the survey, or the number of locations are excessive, the operation would not be cost-effective. In this research we investigate using macroscopic... 

Expansions of large urban areas, as well as increase in the rate of car ownership, has given rise to the urban traffic congestion. One of the major approach to cope with the congestion issue is named Transit Oriented Development (TOD), which will cause changes in trip departure times, route choice, mode choice, and trip destinations. TOD also affects the land use in long-run periods. The goal of this study is to clarify the long-term impacts of TOD on land use and find the appropriate transit projects in order to abate the drawbacks of changes in land us. Land use/ transportation has been the subject of many recent studies. One of the previous studies investigates land use and transportation... 

Network design problem (NDP) is an important problem in transportation planning, in which transit network design is one the most important problems. Public transportation means, however, can not meet urban mobility needs in the developing countries satisfactorily. Bus services are usually unsuitable, insufficient, and unreliable. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, is an emerging public transport alternative designed to provide appropriate, low cost, and effective services, and improve mobility in both developed and developing countries. To design public transportation systems, existing constraints such as resources and budget have to be considered to serve estimated demand properly. Bus Rapid... 

This research deals with pricing private automobiles entering a congested area in urban CBD to reduce auto-related air pollution. There are two factors affecting the pollution level: car volumes, and the weather condition. A Markov decision process is employed to find the optimal tolls and determine the prices for different states of the system, under several weather conditions. The demand for travel is elastic. It is assumed that users change modes in the short run. In longer terms, the part of the demand with shopping, recreation, or similar flexible trip purposes change the respective demand levels according to the price level. The study attempts to estimate elastic demand functions for... 

Congestion is the inseparable part of everyday life in large transportation networks. Expansion of road networks especially in downtown area is next to impossible and it is resulting multiplicative congestion problems. Congestion imposes private and public costs. Therefore, restricting policies on road use through cordon-based or area-based pricing is proposed to reduce the negative impacts of traffic, travel demand management and optimal use of transportation systems. This would produce better resource allocation through transportation network optimization. Implementation of congestion pricing policies induces short-term and long-term effects. In this thesis, it is attempted to determine... 

The purpose of this research is to provide a method for finding a “good” solution to the network design problem with less computational efforts, faster than the existing conventional methods of solving this problem. Network design problem is the problem of selecting a subset of projects from a set of alternative projects so that to optimize the objective function (e.g., the total travel time in the network) subject to the set of existing constraints (e.g., budget). Due to the combinatorial and non-convex nature of the problem, its solution could be very cumbersome and time-consuming. Various methods have been proposed to solve this problem efficiently, providing good solutions at high... 

Resiliency is, now, recognized as a vital characteristics of every urban transportation network. This is so, because transportation network is considered as a life-line in disastrous events, such as major earthquakes. In this respect, design of networks may be considered (1) before the incident, (2) after the incident for 72 hours, and (3) from this 72 hours on. From the point of view of (1), design of the network may be considered as strengthening important links under budget constraints to withstand the design incident, in order to be able to function properly (to help the affected people, to evacuate the populated area, etc.).Design of network based on the point of view of (2), the one...