Using resilience as a measure to prioritize transportation network recovery
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Transportation infrastructure plays a vital role in our daily lives, including the movement of people and goods. During the life cycle of a transportation facility, it experiences countless weather and other disruptive events that cause various degree of damage and degradation. Transportation asset management requires investments in both routine maintenances to keep the infrastructure in a state of good repair and repair of damage after unavoidable weather or other related events. Wise investments reduce the consequences and potential propagation of disruptions. In addition, vulnerability, reliability, risk management, and transportation infrastructure resilience has recently drawn attention, in practice and academic research, due to more frequent extreme weather events occurring. The resilience research related to transportation infrastructure not only focuses on the ability to resist the disruption and maintain maximum functionality, but also on the ability to recover efficiently and restore performance. ☐ Efficient recovery involves allocating resources optimally as multiple disruptions occur. However, the recovery in practice may rely on the agency’s past experience and the stakeholders’ request without holistic systematic strategies. This research firstly reviews the resilience literature to document the state-of-the-art, including the various definitions, the relationships to existing methods, for example risk management and vulnerability, and their applications. This research develops a methodology to identify the recovery strategies for a transportation network by using resilience as a performance measure recognizing the computational challenges in identifying an optimal solution. Three case studies: a hypothetical network, an interstate corridor and a regional network demonstrated the application of the methodology. The last case study presents a two-stage method, using Modified Network Robustness Index (MNRI) to prioritize projects and incremental benefit cost analysis to select repair alternatives. The two-stage method is computationally efficient and is a rapid recovery decision support approach for the prioritization of the repair order and the selection of repair alternatives. The results achieved without an excessive computational burden are close to the near optimal solutions developed using heuristic algorithms for the case study based on a regional network. The research also reviews the relevant concepts, legislative requirements that link asset management, risk and resilience, and tools available to support risk-based asset management, including forty-nine state transportation asset management plans. In conclusion, the research demonstrates the role of resilience as a new measure to facilitate transportation asset management and insights into strategies for network recovery.
Description
Keywords
Disaster recovery, Prioritize, Resilience, Resource allocation, Transportation network