A greedy-navigator approach to navigable city plans

TL;DR

This paper explores how optimizing navigability indices influences the shape and structure of simulated street networks, revealing qualitative similarities and quantitative differences based on metrics and routing strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a greedy shortcut method to generate city plans optimized for navigability indices, highlighting the impact of metrics and routing schemes on network structure.

Findings

Emerging structures differ from real road networks but are plausible.

Triangular blocks tend to form across different indices.

Metrics primarily influence overall shape, routing affects local details.

Abstract

We use a set of four theoretical navigability indices for street maps to investigate the shape of the resulting street networks, if they are grown by optimizing these indices. The indices compare the performance of simulated navigators (having a partial information about the surroundings, like humans in many real situations) to the performance of optimally navigating individuals. We show that our simple greedy shortcut construction strategy generates the emerging structures that are different from real road network, but not inconceivable. The resulting city plans, for all navigation indices, share common qualitative properties such as the tendency for triangular blocks to appear, while the more quantitative features, such as degree distributions and clustering, are characteristically different depending on the type of metrics and routing strategies. We show that it is the type of metrics used which determines the overall shapes characterized by structural heterogeneity, but the routing schemes contribute to more subtle details of locality, which is more emphasized in case of unrestricted connections when the edge crossing is allowed.