Measures of Inland Waterway Network Resilience

Abstract

AbstractInland waterways represent a vital component in the larger multi‐modal transportation network that maintains commodity flows across the US. These waterways are subject to disruptive events including whether malevolent attacks, natural disasters, manmade accidents, or common failures. As such, an ability to quantify the vulnerability and recoverability of inland waterways, as it pertains to the inclusive measure of network resilience, is addressed in this work. The paper deploys existing resilience measures to quantify the resilience of inland waterway networks, including: (i) a stochastic measure of time required for the network to achieve full resilience, and (ii) associated resilience‐based component importance measures that highlight the critical waterway links that contribute to waterway network resilience. A data‐driven case study illustrates these metrics to describe commodity flows along the various links of the US Mississippi River Navigation System.