Population-driven Urban Road Evolution Dynamic Model

In this paper, we propose a road evolution model by considering the interaction between population distribution and urban road network. In the model, new roads need to be constructed when new zones are built, and existing zones with higher population density have higher probability to connect with new roads. The relative neighborhood graph and a Fermat-Weber location problem are introduced as the connection mechanism to capture the characteristics of road evolution. The simulation experiment is conducted to demonstrate the effects of population on road evolution. Moreover, the topological attributes for the urban road network are evaluated using degree distribution, betweenness centrality, coverage, circuitness and treeness in the experiment. Simulation results show that the distribution of population in the city has a significant influence on the shape of road network, leading to a growing heterogeneous topology.