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

Abstract

Over the past few years, both recognizing sustainable development and improving road safety have been main issues in policies for transport and mobility in Europe. Since 2001, the European Commission had published several reports about the improvement of the level of safety and sustainability on the European road network. However, few tools or methodologies have been developed to support actively the road sector in the design of safer and greener roads. Consequently, this research project aims to develop a multicriteria analysis methodology to carry out an integrated and preventive assessment of the road safety performances and the 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 is studied by means of well-known performance indicators.

Data Envelopment Analysis for the assessment of road safety in urban road networks: A comparative study using CCR and BCC models

“…In the past two decades, there has been a growth of interest by policy makers in the use of composite indices for road safety assessment that aggregate in a summary indicator the various parameters at hand (Coll et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2015;Castro Nuño and Arévalo-Quijada, 2018). Most of the available methodologies for assessing road safety composite indicators rely on multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods (Sarrazin and De Smet, 2016), each with its own advantages and disadvantages (El Gibari et al, 2019;Wątróbski, 2016;Velasquez and Hester, 2013). Table 1 summarizes the main strengths and weaknesses of the most common MCDM methods in the light of their application to road safety performance.…”

Applying multicriteria decision analysis to design safe road projects

“…Finally, we may use a complementary methodology to solve the multicriteria problem. However, a detailed analysis of this solving process goes beyond the scope of this paper (Sarrazin and De Smet, 2014).…”