Transportation infrastructure projects take numerous years of planning before they are scheduled for construction. Prioritization of such projects over a multi-period planning horizon (under a limited budget) is a difficult task, as it is usually formulated as a bilevel network design problem (NDP). Although multi-period network investment is studied in the literature, its application by public agencies is limited because of the complexities involved in network design problems and the computational time needed to analyze large scale networks (i.e., performing the traffic assignment at the lower level of the NDP). The contribution of this research is two-fold. First, it extends a previously published single year discrete network design formulation to a multi-period discrete network design problem (MPNDP) to capture both the spatial and temporal patterns of multi-period network investment decisions. Second, using the MPNDP investment results; and the network characteristics, this research develops and evaluates a new econometric model the Multi-Period Econometric Network Investment Model (MENIM). MENIM can be used by agencies in place of MPNDP to approximate network investments. The proposed model is calibrated and validated using medium to large scale networks and results show that it provides comparable results to MPNDP within acceptable computational times. Patterns of multi-period network investments from these numerical experiments are also extensively discussed along with policy recommendations for public agencies.

交通基础设施项目在计划建设之前需要经过多年的规划。在多周期规划范围内（在有限预算下）确定此类项目的优先级是一项艰巨的任务，因为它通常被表述为双层网络设计问题 (NDP)。尽管文献中研究了多周期网络投资，但由于涉及网络设计问题的复杂性和分析大规模网络所需的计算时间（即在较低级别执行流量分配），公共机构的应用受到限制。新民主党）。这项研究的贡献是双重的。第一的，它将先前发布的单年离散网络设计公式扩展到多周期离散网络设计问题 (MPNDP)，以捕获多周期网络投资决策的空间和时间模式。二、利用MPNDP投资成果；以及网络特征，本研究开发并评估了一种新的计量经济模型——多期计量经济网络投资模型（MENIM）。机构可以使用 MENIM 代替 MPNDP 来估算网络投资。所提出的模型使用大中型网络进行校准和验证，结果表明它在可接受的计算时间内提供了与 MPNDP 相当的结果。