Review article
Forest Road Network and Transportation Engineering – State and Perspectives
Hans Rudolf Heinimann
; Programme Director, Future Resilient Systems Singapore-ETH Centre 1 CREATE Way #06-01 CREATE Tower Singapore 138602
Abstract
The paper reviews traditional and computer-assisted road network layout approaches and brings them together in an overall stream of development. It results in the main finding that changes in the representation of the road network layout problem triggered major scientific advancements. A systematic, 2D transport geometry representation emerged in the 1870s and led to the mathematical derivation of optimal road spacing. The representation of road network and harvest layout problem as a mathematical graph and the solution of the corresponding linear programming problem, triggered a representational shift in the early 1970s. The broad availability of digital elevation models DEMs at the beginning of the 1990s was another representational innovation, enabling an automatic road route layout on the terrain DEM surface. The most recent shift consisted of systems to semi-automatically, concurrently laying out harvest/transport-network problems on DEMs in the mid-1990s. The review identifies challenges for future research, among which the extension of the concurrent harvest/road-network layout systems for multi-objective functions is the first importance. Considering that scientific advancement is mostly going along with changes in problem representations, research should explore improved representations for lattice type terrain representation, among which triangular irregular network (TIN) meshes seem to be the first interest. Additional paths for improvements are the integration of road network planning with detailed road engineering, the refinement of optimization problems formulations, and the cross-national adaptation of road network planning courses to operations-research-based approaches.
Keywords
road network; network layout; road spacing; road density; computer-assisted network layout
Hrčak ID:
190896
URI
Publication date:
1.7.2017.
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