School Start Time Selection for the Morning Commute Problem: A Regional Modeling and Optimization Approach

Urban traffic congestion during morning rush hour is a source of severe discomfort for commuters. Some commuters must make an intermediate stop at a school to drop off their children before heading to their destination. On the other hand, a different portion of commuters utilize the same network infrastructure to arrive at their destination directly. The fact that schools start at the same time implies that the school-oriented commuters depart from their homes almost simultaneously, significantly contributing to congestion. To address this issue, we propose a feedback-based mechanism that in conjunction with different optimization solvers, staggers the start time of schools such that the peak demand is redistributed. The related problem is formulated as a bi-objective mixed integer nonlinear program that jointly minimizes i) the total time spent by all vehicles inside the network and ii) the overall change between the initial and the staggered start time of the schools. Simulation experiments verify that for the examined network architecture, the developed approach can pinpoint school start times that can completely eliminate congestion.