Improving post-disaster road network accessibility by strengthening links against failures

摘要

A disaster may damage infrastructure such as roads, water, electricity and natural gas and hamper their functioning. A disaster like an earthquake can cause immense damage to roads, buildings, railways and aerodromes. Highways constitute a major transportation infrastructure for sending supplies after a disaster. To take care of such situations, alternative emergency routes are essential. Highway administrators can strengthen structures based on system-wide vulnerability and accessibility analysis. This article proposes a model for post-disaster functionality of highway networks using correlated edge failures. The model is used to optimize expected post disaster accessibility by pre-disaster structural improvements in selected areas. To do this, the impact should be predicted and short and reliable alternative paths should be identified. Selection of such a set of emergency routes between the origin and destination is an important disaster preparedness effort. Important dissimilar paths with minimum common edges can increase the reliability of such facilities. Three path generation methods namely, k-shortest path algorithm, iterative penalty method and p-dispersion method are implemented. The first generates shortest paths and the other two, dissimilar paths. Another factor is predicting which edges will be operational and which path will survive. This can be done using a link failure model. The article proposes a new link dependency model for failure of links that accounts for correlation of disaster factors and structural properties. The links should be structurally improved so that they will not fail in the event of a disaster. (55 refs.)