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

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.