Generating alternative routes by multicriteria evaluation and a genetic algorithm

The usual method of generating alternative motorway routes involves the use of a shortest route algorithm which is available within most geographic information systems. In this paper an alternative approach is adopted. It involves the combination of a niching type of genetic algorithm with ranking-based multicriteria evaluation. Such an approach is found to compare favourably with the traditional approach in terms of computational effort, quality of the routes generated, and diversity of the alternatives proposed.