A Quantitative Analysis of Sustainability and Green Transportation Initiatives in Highway Design and Maintenance

摘要

Sustainability and green transportation initiatives have been widely promoted in highway design and maintenance in recent years. While there are many definitions of sustainability and green transportation, there has mainly been a qualitative description of such initiatives in previous works. In this paper we propose a quantitative analysis of sustainability and green transportation from highway design and maintenance perspective. There is a considerable interaction between highway design and maintenance. For example, a well designed and maintained highway should jointly minimize the initial and life-cycle costs. But, generally a precise account of maintenance life-cycle cost analysis is not performed in the design stages of a highway. In this paper a highway alignment optimization problem is analyzed and evaluated based on the joint minimization of initial and life-cycle costs. An illustrative example is presented.