A robust urban traffic network design with signal settings

• A robust urban traffic network (UTN) model is proposed.
• A robust bi-level programming (BLP) model is formulated for UTN system under uncertain travel demand.
• A trust-region cutting plane projection (TCPP) approach is presented.
• TCPP successfully solves robust BLP with least price of robustness.
• TCPP outperformed recent heuristics soling BLP at worst-case scenarios.

An urban traffic network (UTN) accounting for signal setting and link capacity expansion under uncertain travel demand is considered. In order to mitigate vulnerability of UTN system, a robust bi-level model is firstly presented. A trust-region cutting plane projection (TCPP) is proposed in this paper to solve the proposed robust bi-level model. Numerical computations for proposed bi-level model were performed using various test road networks. Computational comparisons for proposed approach were also made with other heuristics. It indicates that the proposed approach can substantially enhance greater system performance of UTN system as compared to other alternatives while incurring less CPU time. In particular, in comparison with a recently proposed heuristic, the proposed approach improved robustness of UTN system with significance whilst maintaining optimality of nominal solutions.