Highway systems: How good are they, really?

Abstract Highways play a crucial role in transportation services as they facilitate long-distance traveling and allow driving at an almost constant speed, thus resulting in lower fuel consumption and emissions. Many existing highway systems were designed before practical computational tools had been developed. Furthermore, most existing approaches to evaluating highways focus on analyzing mobility data rather than studying the design of the highway system. To address this gap in existing research, in this paper, we investigate the problem of evaluating the efficacy of the design of real-world highway systems. To this end, we propose two novel measures for the effectiveness of highway systems, along with both exact and heuristic algorithms to compute them. In addition, we present a first-cut heuristic algorithm that aims to compute a highway system that optimizes our proposed measures. In our experiments, we demonstrate the potential of our methods in measuring the efficacy of real-world highway systems. We also evaluate the performance of our heuristic algorithm in computing a rough design of an efficient highway system.