ROADENTS (ROAd DEsigN Testing Software)

Vertical Alignment (VA) optimization refers to the problem of finding the minimum cost of earthwork while satisfying VA design constraints. Even though we have many VA methods, there is no software or program to automatically check whether their output is as expected or not. In this thesis, we introduce a software package, called ROADENTS (ROAd DEsigN Testing Software), that can validate the output of a VA technique on simple quadratic artificial roads. Here, we test the output of Quasi Network Flow (QNF), Multi-haul Quasi Network Flow (MQNF) and Softree API (V2) using ROADENTS. Moreover, generating ground profiles with different characteristics can be a painstaking task, especially when we have to build a myriad of ground profiles. To tackle this problem, we incorporate a software component in ROADENTS that can produce different types of ground profiles, ranging from single-segment to sophisticated multi-segment ground profiles. Using this, researchers can generate thousands of quadratic ground profiles in just a few seconds. ROADENTS is not only a VA model checker or a ground profile generator, but also a VA visualizer, and a .CSV area converter. In the road design world, every VA model accepts a ground profile in a different format. Utilizing ROADENTS, users can convert the format of the ground profiles into the desired format very quickly and efficiently. Supplementary materials found at: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/72309.Arts and Sciences, Irving K. Barber School of (Okanagan)Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics and Statistics, Department of (Okanagan)Graduat