Time-dependent Road Network Design with Land Use Consideration: The Issue of Sustainability

Abstract

Sustainability is a hot topic nowadays because there is growing awareness of human activities including transport activities that can have significant environmental impacts and can impose economic, social and ecological damages. It is therefore important to consider sustainability into network design to reduce the negative impacts of transport activities. This paper develops a multi-objective time-dependent network design model to consider the economic, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability. Land-use transport interaction over time is also captured to study the effect of network design on landowners. The variances of discounted landowner profit and discounted user generalized cost are proposed as indicators of two sustainability issues, namely landowner inequity and intergeneration inequity respectively. Numerical studies are set up to illustrate the properties of the problem. In particular, the result shows that it may not be possible to simultaneously optimize all sustainability objectives. Tradeoffs must be carefully made between these objectives.