Title: Design safer and greener road projects by using a multi-objective evolutionary approach

Authors: Renaud Sarrazin; Yves De Smet

Addresses: Department of Mobility, Safety and Road Management, Belgian Road Research Center, 42 Boulevard de la Woluwe, 1200 Brussels, Belgium ' Department of Computer and Decision Engineering, École polytechnique de Bruxelles, Université libre de Bruxelles, 50 Avenue F.D. Roosevelt CP 210/01, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

Abstract: Over the past few years, both recognising sustainable development and improving road safety have been main issues in policies for transport and mobility in Europe. However, few methodologies have been developed to support actively the road sector in the design of safer and greener roads. Consequently, this research project aimed to develop a multicriteria analysis methodology to carry out an integrated and preventive assessment of the road safety performances and some sustainable aspects of road projects at the design stage. Due to the combinatorial nature of design projects, we have investigated how an evolutionary approach, such as NSGA-II, could help the engineers to identify efficient alternatives. The algorithm was studied by means of well-known performance indicators. These showed the quality of the solutions generated by the algorithm in terms of convergence and diversity. In particular, the binary hypervolume indicator underlined the quality of the approximation set.

Keywords: multi-objective optimisation; NSGA-II; genetic algorithms; performance indicators; road design; road safety; project design; greener roads; sustainable development; sustainability; multicriteria analysis.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMCDM.2016.075623

International Journal of Multicriteria Decision Making, 2016 Vol.6 No.1, pp.14 - 34

Received: 30 Aug 2014
Accepted: 16 Jun 2015
Published online: 30 Mar 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article