Post-Earthquake Functionality Assessment of Urban Road Network Considering Emergency Response

ABSTRACT

As one of the most important urban infrastructure systems, the road network plays a vital role in post-earthquake emergency response. Quantitative evaluation of the emergency response functionality of road network under earthquakes can provide decision support for emergency planning and future construction. In this paper, a novel network performance metric is proposed to consider both the special traffic demand in emergency response and the supply capability of road network. On this basis, an integrated probabilistic assessment framework for post-earthquake network emergency response functionality is presented, considering various uncertainties. In the framework, a penalty-based approach is proposed to consider the impact of partially degraded links on network functionality. At last, the proposed methodology is illustrated on the road network of Tangshan city, China, under different seismic scenarios.

KEYWORDS:

• Road network
• emergency response
• network functionality
• earthquake engineering
• accessibility
• decision making

Acknowledgments

The opinions and conclusions presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring organizations.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51938004, 51825801, U1939210, and 51921006), Heilongjiang Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. LBH-Z16085), and Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province (No. LH2019G006). These supports are greatly appreciated.