A GIS-based approach for estimating community transportation exposure and capacity in the context of disaster resilience

Abstract

Transportation is a critical sector for communities. It is, however, particularly vulnerable to climate change, and a disruption in its infrastructure impacts the whole community. Enhancing the resilience of transportation infrastructure is vital for reliable and sustainable functionalities, and subsequently, to more resilient communities. There are indices and frameworks that assess and evaluate transportation resilience and performance, ranging from component-based, to network and system metrics. The existing approaches, however, usually overlook location and capacity of critical transportation components. These two characteristics possess significant effects on the resilience and performance of the transportation sector. Moreover, the stress type and its magnitude should be incorporated in the resilience assessment. In this work, we leverage a recent resilience quantification framework to compute the Exposure and Capacity-based Transportation Resilience Index (EC-TRI), describing the resilience of the transportation infrastructure, focusing on the location and capacity of certain assets. We argue for the adoption of this index as a complement to existing frameworks, and we develop a web-based GIS framework to evaluate EC-TRI for communities within New Jersey (NJ). The novelty of EC-TRI lies in its consideration for the stress level, the exposure and capacity characteristics of transportation assets, as well as in its practicality and scalability. Users can leverage EC-TRI to locate the weak and vulnerable components within the transportation network, and to provide a community-based assessment of the resilience level of the transportation infrastructure. In addition, we provide EC-TRI as a highly scalable GIS framework, providing users with the ability to adjust the quantification components as per local needs and priorities.