Determining Highway Corridors

Abstract

In the highway development process, the first planning stage is that of selecting a corridor along which the highway is to pass. Highway corridor selection represents a multicriteria decision process in which a variety of social, enviromental and economic factors must be evaluated and weighted for a large number of corridor alternatives. This paper proposes a demand-based approach to provide a set of potential corridors. The problem is formulated as a continuous location model which seeks a set of optimal corridors with respect to the demand of potential users while satisfying budget constraints. This model uses geographical information in order to estimate the length-dependent costs (such as pavement and construction cost) and the cost of earth movement. A procedure for finding the best local minima of the optimization model is proposed. This method is tested using the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm, two algorithms of the Simulated Annealing type and the Simplex Nedelmar method. An application using the Castilla-La Mancha\\s geographic database is presented.