The Road to Prosperity: A Study on the Efficiency of Resource Allocation in China’s Expressway Construction

This paper presents a new multi-objective mixed integer programming model to prioritize seven highway infrastructure projects. The proposed model explicitly incorporates socio-economics, uncertainty, resource constraints, and interdependencies to deal with the optimal transportation infrastructure project selection problem. Next, project prioritization is determined based on the ANP results, which reflect the interdependency between criteria and a set of feasible candidate projects. Finally, an empirical study of eastwest highway improvement program is conducted to illustrate how the modeling process proceeds. The results show that the proposed model can effectively support a transportation investment policy that best suits the goal of urban land redevelopment for highly urbanized settings. As such, the model can be generalized for other human settlement studies and illustrate the spatially complex characteristics of transportation networks as well as some of the difficulties raised with respect to priority of national capital improvement projects. The research will provide a useful reference for the study of the relationship between highways and regional economic development.