Approaches to Geo-mathematical Modelling

Chapter 18Network Evolution: A Transport Example

Francesca Pagliara, Alan G. Wilson and Valerio de Martinis

18.1 Introduction

A major challenge for urban modelling has been, and is, the development of dynamic models of the evolution of urban structure. Considerable progress has been made in relation to, for example, retail structure, but modelling the evolution of transport networks is more difficult. There is a higher degree of complexity in this case. In the retail example, the ‘structure’ is the vector of sizes of retail centres at points in space. In the transport case, the elements are not points but links of a network, and the problem is further complicated by the fact that origin–destination flows are carried on routes which are sequences of links. It is also the case that ‘size of link’ does not capture the reality of the nature of network evolution: a multilane highway, for example, is grade-separated and of a different nature from lower ‘levels’ of link.

In the wider literature of the field, many interesting perspectives have been developed, and are still developing, on transport network planning, considering different aspects that vary from a specific modelling evaluation of trip distribution (Tsekeris and Stathopoulos, 2006) and modal split (Ben Akiva et al., 1985), to the analysis of road network structures and geometric classifications for land-use and network development (Levinson and Karamalaputi, 2003; Levinson et al., 2007; Xie et al., 2007b) together with ...