Performance Measure–Based Framework for Evaluating Transportation Infrastructure Resilience

Abstract

Despite many organizations recognizing the need for more comprehensive resilience planning for transportation infrastructure, the United States still lacks a standardized planning framework to guide these decisions and prioritize improvements. Therefore, this paper develops and demonstrates the application of a flexible resilience framework that supports transportation resilience decision-making across multiple operational and infrastructure systems. This Performance-based Resilience Evaluation Procedure (PREP) framework calculates comparable resilience scores and can be implemented for any type of transportation infrastructure to assist transportation agencies and community stakeholders in making informed decisions in relation to project prioritization, risk mitigation, asset management, and design for more reliable infrastructure. The PREP framework, comprised of 12 steps organized in five phases, calculates resilience as a weighted probability of hazard events and the impacts of such hazards on measures of performance. Having such a framework is crucial because it allows stakeholders to develop the data-driven knowledge necessary to deliver informed management and planning of the entire transportation infrastructure system against disruptive events.