Park-and-ride facilities design for special events using space-time network models

Given that more and more planned special events are hosted in urban areas, during which travel demand is considerably higher than usual, it is one of the most effective strategies opening public rapid transit lines and building park-and-ride facilities to allow visitors to park their cars and take buses to the event sites. In the meantime, special event workforce often needs to make balances among the limitations of construction budget, land use and targeted travel time budgets for visitors. As such, optimizing the park-and-ride locations and capacities is critical in this process of transportation management during planned special event. It is also known as park-and-ride facility design problem.

This thesis formulates and solves the park-and-ride facility design problem for special events based on space-time network models. The general network design process with park-and-ride facilities location design is first elaborated and then mathematical programming formulation is established for special events. Meanwhile with the purpose of relax some certain hard constraints in this problem, a transformed network model which the hard park-and-ride constraints are pre-built into the new network is constructed and solved with the similar solution algorithm. In doing so, the number of hard constraints and level of complexity of the studied problem can be considerable reduced in some cases. Through two case studies, it is proven that the proposed formulation and solution algorithms can provide effective decision supports in selecting the locations and capabilities of park-and-ride facilities for special events.