Research On The Automatic Design Of Mountain-Highway Profile Alignment

Nowadays, there has been increasing demand on transportation in company with economic development, and construction of high-grade highway is stretching to mountainous and heavy-hilly areas gradually from plain and light-hilly areas, thanks to rapid development of computer technology, computer-aided design (CAD) has been widely applied and developed in respect of highway design. As a result of complexity and variability of landforms in mountainous area, comparing to profile alignment design for plain area, highway design for mountainous area takes account of the integrated factors including design criterions, landforms, road grade, alignment quality and engineering costs etc.After researching current application of computer-aided design and automatic design to profile alignment designing at home and abroad, as well catering for landform characteristics of mountainous area, this paper makes a new tentative approach to automatic design of highway profile alignment, it simulates the process of profile alignment design by programming in computer language MATLAB, made research on theoretical analysis and practical achievement of modification to traditional profile alignment design by means of modeling and programming, discusses possible replacement of man-involved activities in alignment design with mathematical models, and how to automatically design highway profile alignment in mountainous area with help of more simple and efficient CAD software to satisfy both alignment quality and engineering costs. Furthermore, this paper probes into designing method and evaluation standards for highway of different grades in view of both alignment quality and engineering costs, gives some evaluation indications to describe alignment quality and economical efficiency in engineering, also corresponding evaluation indication values have been formed directly from program for purpose of design plan evaluation.After applying the program to highway profile alignment design for sample sections of expressway and secondary road in mountainous area, the result shows that: the program is able to satisfy requirement on highway designing at normal mountainous area with complicated landforms, it allows designers to assign specific values to several different control parameters based on landform characteristics and road grade to produce plans comply with design purpose. Alignment designed by the program shows both good alignment quality and good economical efficiency in construction, also, moreover, this paper can offer certain help in respects of planning and indications while doing further vertical alignment designing.