Planning the construction of new transport routes or power lines on terrain is usually carried out manually by engineers, with no guarantee of optimality. We introduce a new approach for the computation of an optimal trajectory for the construction of new transit routes and power lines between two locations on a submanifold $$U\subset \mathbb {R}^{3}$$
U
⊂
R
3
representing the topography of a terrain. U is approximatively modeled by a special weighted grid. On this grid, the shortest paths for the construction of new routes are determined, whereby we consider three optimization criteria: routes with minimum distance, routes with lowest construction costs and routes with minimum absolute altitude variations or minimum absolute gradients. Subsequently, a combination of these criteria is used to expand this problem into a multi-criteria optimization problem. A shortest path algorithm, such as the Dijkstra algorithm, is used to compute optimal compromises for the construction of new routes.