Comparative evaluation of measures for urban highway network resilience due to traffic incidents

Abstract

Abstract The resilience of an urban highway network may be described as the ability for a highway network’s operation to adapt and rapidly recover from a disruptive event. Although the concept of resilience has been studied in the past decades, researchers have yet to agree on common measures of quantifying urban highway network resilience. This paper proposed five candidate measures of urban highway network resilience that are consistent with the concept of resilience triangle. They are derived from queue length, link speed, link travel time, frontage road delay and detour route delay, respectively. These measures were calculated from outputs of a mesoscopic traffic simulation model that mimicked the highway network in the El Paso, Texas region. Thirty scenarios were simulated, each with a complete link closure at a selected major highway location caused by a traffic incident. The results have shown that the five measures are not statistically correlated with each other, and the different measures produced different ranked lists in decreasing order of the impacts of the links closure locations. This means that using different resilience measures will lead to different conclusions in the order of disruption caused by the link closures. The outcomes supports the notion that a common measure of transportation highway resilience may not be necessary, and researchers may define their own resilience measures to meet individual project’s need.