Assessing resilience in a regional road-based transportation network

Abstract

Resilience deals with the response of the system in the face of shock and its ability to continue to provide the expected service delivery levels. In the transportation infrastructure, system shocks due to man-made and natural causes occur frequently and result in substantial economic losses; it is therefore crucial to enhance the resilience of this infrastructure. Improving the resilience of systems creates a need for developing metrics that measure the current resilience of the system and provides a benchmark for evaluating different strategies for improving resilience. In this paper, we propose a framework for assessing the resilience of a regional road network. The methodology introduced in this paper is the Networked Infrastructure Resilience Assessment (NIRA) framework, which allows decision-makers to assess the resilience of networked infrastructures from a multi-metric perspective. The resilience metrics measure the impact of disruptions on the system performance measures. The three identified metrics for road networks are the travel time resilience, environmental resilience and cost resilience. The resilience values are measured by introducing hypothetical disruptions to a network model of a regional transportation network. The NIRA framework is applied to the transportation corridor between Boston and New York City. We also investigate the impact of disruptions on the traveller’s mode choice.