Emerging Social Dilemmas in Managing Transportation-Related Carbon Footprint in Optimal Urban Infrastructure Development

Urban areas are facing an enormous pressure for mobility opportunities, a phenomenon closely related to economic activity and urban welfare growth. The development of urban transportation networks is a vital component in the performance of metropolitan complexes, where multiple policies can be employed and multiple objectives is urged to be met. In this paper, a policydriven approach will be presented for providing optimal investment plans for future network expansions, by taking into account the management of carbon footprint related to the vehicle emissions on urban networks. In particular, optimal network design and pricing decisions will be attempted to be inquired in order multiple social, economical and environmental targets to be simultaneously optimized. Under this framework, multiple social dilemmas are able to be revealed, while quantitative results can support decisions related to the sustainable urban development. The methodological approach presented here is based on an advanced formulation of a complex, nonconvex, multi-level, vector optimization programming problem, while the solution sets are composed of the Pareto Front, estimated by suitably hybridized evolutionary algorithms. Insights are provided by applying the proposed framework into a part of a realistic network, for alternative problem setups. Key-Words: Sustainable urban development, optimal transportation planning, vector optimization, distance-based genetic algorithms