Highway maintenance may cause excessive delay on transportation corridors and networks. Diverting traffic from congested highway work zones and accelerating maintenance progress can mitigate the adverse traffic impacts. In this study, the time-varying traffic diversion due to work zones is formulated analytically and incorporated with a work zone schedule optimization model. The developed model optimizes work zone schedules jointly considering the time-varying traffic diversion, variable maintenance cost and production rate of different maintenance crews, which minimizes the total cost including agency cost and user’s cost. The numerical example compares various combinations of the mitigation plans in a generalized two-link network, consisting of a freeway and an alternate route. The results of sensitivity analysis indicate that implementing traffic diversion is desirable as the freeway volume exceeds the threshold found in this study. This study demonstrates a feasible approach to plan maintenance activities cost-effectively for a real-world highway resurfacing project. The developed model is also applicable to evaluate the effectiveness of traffic diversion plans for pre-determined work zone schedules.