Comparison of Importance Indices for Highway Network Reliability Improvement Combined with Cost–Benefit Analysis

Abstract

AbstractThe 2011 Japan Earthquake and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake disrupted many sections in the highway networks and consequently blocked emergency and rescue activities in the wide area. Thus, it is very important to construct a highly reliable highway network in advance for not only abnormal but also normal period. Network reliability can be improved effectively by improving key links under limited resources. Once such key links are identified, network reliability can be efficiently improved and maintained. For identifying the key links, several importance indices such as Birnbaum’s importance (RI) and criticality importance (CI) have been proposed. However, use of these indices is found to lead to unreasonable results in the small networks in this chapter. Thus use of RI and CI is inappropriate for an actual network. Therefore, this chapter demonstrates the advantage of the improved importance index (CIW) proposed by authors. Then this chapter proposes a combination strategy of CIW and cost–benefit analysis (B/C), and provides comparative analyses.KeywordsNetwork reliability improvementReliability importanceCriticality importanceCost–benefit analysisBoolean absorption