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Sensitivity analysis and section positioning for road design model

University of British Columbia

Economy is one of the most important factors to develop a country and roads are vital to expedite the economy growth. Although road networks lead to social and economic development, the road construction and maintenance are expensive activities. Therefore, there is a strong interest in minimizing the construction cost, while satisfying safety and environmental constraints. Different road design models have been proposed, but the sensitivity of these models to their input parameters has not yet been analyzed. Sensitivity analysis of a road model before building the road is highly suggested because it helps to investigate the stability of the model and identify the parameters that have the most effect on the variability of the model output. In addition, sensitivity analysis helps to enhance the communication between modelers and decision makers (managers). Therefore, different sensitivity analysis methods are presented in this thesis and the sensitivity of a road model to its inputs is studied. Moreover, in a road design model, the ground is discretized into sections and the number of sections is highly correlated with the optimization time. Designing roads that consider all sections is too time consuming to be practical. Thus, different methods are presented in this thesis to reduce the number of sections while keeping the accuracy of the ground profile.

Text

2017-03-12

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/59212

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/