Integrated seismic risk and resilience assessment of roadway networks in earthquake prone areas

Abstract

Intercity networks constitute a highly important civil infrastructure in developed countries, as they contribute to the prosperity and development of the connected communities. This was evident after recent strong earthquakes that caused extensive structural damage to key transportation components, such as bridges, overpasses, tunnels and geotechnical works, that in turn led to a significant additional loss associated with the prolonged traffic disruption. In cases of seismic events in developed societies with complex and coupled intercity transportation systems, the interdependency between citizens' life and road functionality has further amplified the seismically-induced loss. Quantifying therefore, the resilience of road networks, defined as their ability to withstand, adapt to, and rapidly recover after a disruptive event, is a challenging issue of paramount importance towards holistic disaster risk mitigation and management. This study takes into account the above aspects of network resilience to earthquake loading and establishes a comprehensive, multi-criterion framework for mitigating the overall loss expected to be experienced by the community due to future earthquake events. The latter is decoupled into the direct structural damage-related loss and the indirect loss associated with the travel delays of the network users, as well as the wider socioeconomic consequences in the affected area. In order to reflect the multidimensional nature of loss, a set of novel, time-variant indicators is herein introduced, while cumulative indicators are proposed for assessing the total loss incurred throughout the entire recovery period. This probabilistic risk management framework is implemented into a software to facilitate informed decisions of the stakeholders, both before and after a major earthquake event, thus prioritizing the pre-disruption strengthening schemes and accelerating the inspection and recovery measures, respectively.

Network Characteristics and Vulnerability Analysis of Chinese Railway Network under Earthquake Disasters

“…There is also some literature on the vulnerability of railway network in Europe. These studies focus on the mechanism of disaster occurrence, and the vulnerability of transportation network is obtained through overlap analysis of hazardous areas and transportation network under a single network [42][43][44].…”

Quantitative Study on the Waterlogging Resilience of Road Transportation System Based on the Validity View of System Functions

“…Zhang and Miller-Hooks proposed a random time-varying integer programming method with a recursive function to assess the disaster resistance of a rail freight system [16]. Kilanitis et al constructed a comprehensive multicriteria framework for earthquake disasters, considering the resilience of a road transportation system to earthquake loads; they also introduced a set of new time-varying indexes and evaluated the total losses in the entire recovery period using an accumulation index [6]. Alipour et al concentrated on the earthquake resilience of a road-bridge network with considerations to the extensive social and economic consequences of network damages, given damages to roads and bridges after earthquakes might cause serious functional degeneration of the entire network [17].…”

“…However, users' decision can affect their perception of the influences of destructive events on traffic conditions [4]. In addition, scenario analyses based on post-disaster recovery from the network perspective investigate disaster resilience [5], and attach significant attention to the resilience of road transportation systems to earthquake disasters [6]; however, they cover waterlogging resilience insufficiently. Generally, studies on the resilience of road transportation systems mainly focus on three aspects but lack the organic combination of these aspects.…”

Seismic Risk Assessment of the Railway Network of China’s Mainland

“…Padgett et al (2010) estimated earthquake damage and losses to bridge infrastructure using region-specific bridge fragility curves. Another line of research has focused on indirect losses, which refer to losses caused by disruptions of the transportation system, resulting in disrupted passenger flows, increased trip times due to detours, and/or disruption of freight flows (Gong et al 2017;Yan et al 2017; Kilanitis and Sextos 2019). Kilanitis and Sextos (2019) and Yan et al (2017) used structure-specific fragility curves to assess the operational loss to transportation systems following earthquakes.…”