Determining Highway Corridors

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, environmental, 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 that seeks a set of optimal corridors with respect to the demand of potential users while satisfying budget constraints. This model uses geographical information 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 by 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. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)TE.1943-5436.0000361. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.