An Integrated Model of Rural Infrastructure Design in Developing Countries

In developing countries, poor geographical accessibility due to poor quality of roads and ineffective public facility locations has made a negative impact on rural residents' welfare. The lack of proper planning of these public infrastructures is also a major problem. The objective of this study is to investigate an integrated model to design an optimal rural road network considering financial and spatial constraints. The rural road network and new multi public facility locations are to be optimally designed simultaneously to achieve least total cost spent by government and residents. Having defined a specific objective and a set of constraints, an optimal rural road network configuration is determined endogenously by searching for an optimal combination value of the decision variables. The model is going to provide the decision makers with useful information of the rural infrastructure investment to explore the validity and effectiveness of capital allocation through the sensitivity analyses.