Abstract
This study proposes a GA-based approach to find the optimal strategy that minimize the overall traffic network costs in case of road closure due to heavy snowfall. A mesoscopic simulation model is adopted to evaluate the system performance in the course of GA implementation. The proposed model is applied to both a simple test network and a real-world freeway network to analyze its performance and practicability. Analysis results suggest that the proposed approach consistently yields near-optimal solutions. They also indicate that the GA-based solution performs much better that the current practice used for determining the snow removal sequence.
