A hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm for solving real-life transportation network design problems

The network-design problem (NDP) has a wide range of applications in transportation, telecommunications, and logistics. The idea is to efficiently design a network of links (roads, optical fibres, etc.) enabling the flow of commodities (drivers, data packets, etc.) to satisfy demand characteristics. Various exact and heuristic methods such as branch and bound, Tabu search, genetic algorithm (GA), ant system (AS) have been developed to address the NDP which is a highly intractable combinatorial problem. The literature has yet to address the NDP in real-size networks. In this study, we propose a new meta-heuristic algorithm for solving large NDPs by hybridising GA and AS methods. The applicability of the proposed meta-heuristic approach to real-size networks is demonstrated at two different sites. First, we use a large real-life problem for the city of Winnipeg, Canada and show that our heuristic method produces exact solutions very efficiently. Second, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm using the data of Sioux Falls (a benchmark in the literature). While the proposed approach produces solutions similar to the other available methods in the literature, it is superior for developing solutions in large-size NDPs.