ABSTRACT
The Coronavirus (COVID-19) is still rampant, causing serious damage to human life, resulting in urban blockades and impeding urban communication. Due to the residents commuting and transporting medical materials, the highway plays an important role as convenient transportation without transfer but also provides a way to spread COVID-19. However, there is no tailored control strategy yet. We proposed a two-stage control strategy to ensure the safe operation of highways under COVID-19. Firstly, based on the existing control experience, we formulate the strategy of closing the toll station considering the demand and the infrastructure construction level. Secondly, as fever is one of the obvious symptoms of COVID-19, a linear model is proposed to choose some points (toll stations or service areas) as detection points to examine the temperature of passengers. The object is to minimize the total cost of highway operation, including detection, detour, exposure, and delay costs. We take the highway network between Chengdu and Mianyang as a case study, showing that: Compared with the benchmark model, the proposed model has different degrees of optimization in total costs. The proposed strategy can provide tailored control strategies for countries that need to carry out highway control and have promotion significance.
