Equity metrics with risk, performance, and cost objectives for the prioritization of transportation projects

Prioritizing and selecting a few critical transportation projects from several competing projects is a multiobjective combinatorial optimization problem (MOCO). Transportation planners and managers are always interested in analyzing and visualizing the tradeoffs involved, but equity issues in distribution of resources are given much less attention. This paper develops a methodology for integrating equity metrics with traditional metrics for planning and prioritizing a large and diverse portfolio of transportation investment projects. The methodology serves to help planners, managers, and engineers to visualize and compare measures of the distributed equity of the allocation along with cost-benefit tradeoffs. It is based on incorporating network-level equity metrics along with traditional metrics in formulating a generic multiobjective combinatorial optimization (MOCO) problem and visualizing multiobjective tradeoffs on the spatial network. A case study of a region demonstrates the use of the methodology in tradeoff analysis for prioritizing and selecting transportation projects. The approach is adaptable to other manufacturing and service industries where consideration of the distributed equity of allocation is an important issue.