Optimal Procedures to Route Over-Dimensioned and Overweight Trucks in a Highway-Bridge Network

摘要

State Departments of Transportation must issue permits to allow trucking companies to use highway networks which include roads of varying widths, turns that may be infeasible for large (long) vehicles, bridges with insufficient weight carrying capacities for very heavy trucks, and underpasses that limit the height of tall trucks. The procedure to find a route must be executed in real time since the entire transaction must take place in just a few minutes. Traditional procedures do not have the capability to identify constrained paths. This article proposes a maximal-capacity path approach subject to a length constraint that excludes routes that may be exceedingly long to be considered cost-effective. The proposed procedure first transforms the original network with penalty turns into an equivalent one without such penalties. Furthermore, bridges with insufficient weight carrying capacity and roads with restricted height or width will be represented as arcs with limited flow capacity. Constrained maximal-flow paths will be identified on the transformed network using an algorithm based on a modified depth first search.