Abstract: Network design problems (NDPs) have long been regarded as one of the most challenging problems in the field of transportation planning due to the intrinsic non-convexity of their bi-level programming form. Furthermore, a mixture of continuous/discrete decision variables makes the mixed network design problem (MNDP) more complicated and difficult to solve. We adopt a surrogate-based optimization (SBO) framework to solve three featured categories of NDPs (continuous, discrete, and mixed-integer). We prove that the method is asymptotically completely convergent when solving continuous NDPs, guaranteeing a global optimum with probability one through an indefinitely long run. To demonstrate the practical performance of the proposed framework, numerical examples are provided to compare SBO with some existing solving algorithms and other heuristics in the literature for NDP. The results show that SBO is one of the best algorithms in terms of both accuracy and efficiency, and it is efficient for solving large-scale problems with more than 20 decision variables. The SBO approach presented in this paper is a general algorithm of solving other optimization problems in the transportation field.

Key words: Network design problem; Surrogate-based optimization; Transportation planning; Heuristics

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