A review of sustainable network design for road networks

The Network Design Problem (NDP) is a strategical decision-making problem in planning, designing, and managing road networks with the aim to make efficient use of limited resources for optimizing the road network performance. Sustainability development is a major concern of various social-economic systems throughout the world. As a critical component of sustainable development, transportation systems should be designed to make positive contributions to the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of the served regions and communities. This requirement significantly uplifts the challenges on the modeling and the analysis of NDP. In this paper, we provide a review on the sustainable road NDP. Specifically, an overview on the three dimensions of sustainable development (i.e., economic, environmental, and social) is first provided, focusing on their representative performance measures relevant to road NDP. Then, we review the existing studies with the classification system of economy and environmentoriented sustainable NDP, economy and equity-oriented sustainable NDP, and three-dimensional sustainable NDP. Future research directions are suggested for advancing the methodological advancement and practical applications of sustainable transportation NDP.