Resilience of a transportation network: Importance of vulnerable nodes

Abstract

Transportation Infrastructure is one of key critical infrastructures which are crucial for a wellfunctioning modern society. This study proposes a resilience-oriented framework for analyzing and ultimately mitigating risk and improving resilience for land transportation networks with a focus on vulnerable nodes. The framework uses network theory and considers the concept of independent pathways, network topology, redundancies in the network, reliability of roads, importance of hub nodes and vulnerable nodes. A network score is developed based on the aforementioned criterion of the network which will be used for comparing different failure scenarios under extreme weather events hazard type. The focus of this paper is the importance of vulnerable nodes, and it tries to highlight that throughout the paper. A numerical example has been utilized to illustrate the use of this framework.