A Combined Graph Theoretic And Transport Planning Framework For The Economic And Functional Analysis Of Large-Scale Road Networks

Road networks are the backbone of our society and a built capital enabling the movement of people and transportation of goods. Their design should comply with both traffic and technical requirements and economic demand, to ensure efficient connectivity, accessibility, optimum resource allocation, and long-term sustainability. Poised on the intersection of this bi-dimensional context, this paper develops a methodological framework incorporating these two dimensions in road network analysis to evaluate both functional and economic aspects of the network. Within this framework, we incorporate functional and economic information into an interurban road graph model constructed on empirical data from Greece, and we afterward evaluate the level of determination and the model’s applicability and usefulness in transportation planning. Overall, our findings reveal the proposed approach capable of evaluating potential interventions in the network and estimating traffic volumes, especially in data-constrained situations. In empirical terms, they indicate that the socio-economic performance of the national road network is satisfactory, albeit not fully optimized.