Rail construction to link major towns or cities is capital intensive, affecting directly or indirectly the tax-payer and owners of property and businesses situated along the path of the rail network. It is in this regard especially that actions that can mitigate or reduce the impact to victims and extraneous cost to the project become important. Two ways are to identify and use the shortest path linking the source and the destination and to factor into the project the cost of demolition and or displacement of property, persons, and businesses. In a previous work of the authors, a bi-criteria optimization model and methodology was developed for the problem in which both the distance and the costs of compensations referred to as Social Cost by the authors were minimized concurrently. Unlike the previous works however, the current paper is premised on testing the model and methodology on real data obtained in connection with a potential case of rail construction to link a town and a major City in Ghana. Furthermore, unlike in the previous works, a model is developed for the social cost criterion and the resulting bi-criteria optimization model run in Matlab using the real data. The results produced four non-dominated paths with the same distance and social cost values for decision-making. Therefore, there can be costs benefits in approaching rail construction in Ghana on the basis of the model.
Keywords: Model, bi-criteria optimization, rail construction, shortest distance, social cost
