Environmental–Economic Trade-Offs in Multimodal Construction Transport for Mountainous Power Transmission Lines: A RUSLE–Pareto Framework

Construction transport for mountainous power transmission lines requires explicit comparison of cost and erosion-related disturbance. This study integrates the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE), a comprehensive disturbance index, demand-weighted average transport cost, and Pareto analysis to compare road, cableway, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) transport. TOPSIS and VIKOR supplement the comparison by ranking the Pareto-front schemes under different preferences. A case study in western Henan, China, evaluated 243 combinations and identified 15 non-dominated schemes. Under the adopted cover-management factors, estimated erosion moduli for cableway and UAV transport were 42.9% and 28.6% of those for road transport at the same slope. Among the eight supported solutions, modes change only in the order road–cableway–UAV with increasing slope, with road transport confined to gentle slopes. As the weight on disturbance increases, first-ranked schemes shift from road–cableway through CCCUU to UAV-dominated configurations. Front membership was unchanged in the four uniform parameter-scaling scenarios; all eight supported solutions were retained in 1000 trials with independent restoration difficulty coefficient errors of up to ±0.05. The framework supports consistent comparison and interpretation of environmental–economic trade-offs in construction transport allocation.