Designing Efficient and Reachable Routes: The $k$-Step-Central Shortest Path Problem (opens in new tab)

Designing rapid transportation routes requires balancing efficiency and reachability. Shortest-path models ensure direct, cost-efficient routes but ignore coverage, while centrality-based approaches maximize accessibility but do not enforce operational constraints. We study the problem of selecting a shortest path that maximizes reachability, measured as the number of nodes within a fixed distance of the path. To do this, we introduce the $k$-St...