ABSTRACT
The performance of transportation networks can greatly impact the recovery of a community after a natural hazard or an extreme event. The concept of resilience, which combines the properties of preparing, absorbing, and recovering from the impacts of an extreme event, can be used as a measure to assess post-event performance of transportation systems. This chapter details a resilience assessment framework for highway or road networks with emphasis on the choice of resilience metric and the necessary input models. For this purpose, functionality must be defined and analyzed on two levels: network and component. Functionality of components (i.e. bridges, and roads) can be defined in terms of their operational status and their ability to carry design traffic. Functionality of the network can have multiple definitions according to the problem definition. The necessary input tools, such as models for vulnerability assessment, recovery, and network flow analysis, must be suitable for application to a regional portfolio. The resilience framework and input tools described in this chapter are flexible to handle multiple definitions of transportation network functionality and highlight several such metrics within the context of community resilience. The application of the framework to the Shelby County road network for a suite of scenario earthquakes explores four different functionality metrics and discusses their impact on resilience quantification. Opportunities are highlighted regarding defining new resilience metrics and the role of the resilience assessment framework in supporting recovery and performance improvement of transportation networks under natural hazards.
