The Prioritization of the Road lines Development in the Iran's East Corridor

Every year in Iran large sum of money is spent in road improvement. Due to this fact that these costs are lower than the required credits and existing projects، the optimum distribution of credits and choosing the prioritized projects are of great importance. Therefore، if they are performed in a logical priority، the maximum efficiency can be gained from credits and performance of annual plans. It is clear when the number of existing alternatives exceeds the few، the issue is not just considered qualitative and all of the parameters must be converted to the measurable، thus the evaluation and comparison of parameters will be possible. Hence، the necessity of presentation of a method which can determine the priority of the projects'' performance through impressing index and parameters. The east corridor is one of the most important country''s routes in which the most part of passenger and freight exchanges is being done (especially freight transport). This corridor comprises of some routes with definite origins and destinations which one have their special physical conditions. The simultaneous improvement of all of these routes is not possible because budget is limited. In this paper، a method is developed to prioritize existing routes in the east corridor، using buffer analysis in ArcGIS9 and a mathematical linear integer programming model as a knapsack problem. Different sections of the axis are prioritized based on this model. The cost and access to the economic، social and service units are the parameters being used in the buffer analysis. The results of the model are acceptable in comparison with traffic statistics and expertise views.