Highway improvement project selection by the joint consideration of cost-benefit and risk criteria

Since highway improvement project selection requires screening thousands of road segments with respect to crashes for further analysis and final project selection, we provide a two-step project selection methodology and describe an application case to demonstrate its advantages. In the first step of the proposed methodology, we will use odds against observing a given crash count, injury count, run-off road count and so on as measures of risk and a multi-criteria pre-selection technique with the objective to decrease the number of prospective improvement locations. In the second step, the final project selection is accomplished based on a composite efficiency measure of estimated cost, benefit and hazard assessment (odds) under budget constraints. To demonstrate the two-step methodology, we will analyze 4 years of accident data at 23 000 locations where the final projects are selected out of several hundred of potential locations. Journal of the Operational Research Society advance online publication, 2 May 2012 doi:10.1057/jors.2012.55