A Family of Methods for Preliminary Highway Alignment

The alignment of a highway is usually determined in two or even three stages. The preliminary stage, also referred to as the corridor selection, is concerned with finding a piecewise linear trajectory, which is refined in the higher stages. In this paper we present a family of methods for this preliminary design, which includes some published methods and some new ones. The new methods shown were designed to overcome some of the more obvious drawbacks of the others. Finally, one specific new method is recommended, which is “Pareto-optimal” and appealing; however, no single method within the family dominates all the others in all the parameters considered.