Investigating the Sensitivity of Road Network Resilience to Demand Variability

Roadways, the links of transportation networks, are susceptible to a variety of degradations. Some degradation patterns are severe; they make the network incapable of meeting origin- destination (OD) demands. Most others are non-severe; they increase the network operational cost while OD demands remain met. In other words, the network structure is resilient to such degradations. It is important for planners to quantify this resilience of a network. The authors have, in a previous study, framed a minimax optimization problem to find the network operational cost— the minimax value—which is irreducible even by re-assignment. The relative difference of the minimax value and the best possible value is interpreted as the network’s resilience. This resilience measure is demand-specific. To generalize the resilience measure, its sensitivity to change in demand should be studied. As it is difficult to analytically establish the sensitivity of resilience to demand, the authors perform computational experiments on different network topologies to bring out a relationship between network resilience and demand. The authors observe that the resilience- demand curve, irrespective of the difference in network size or network topology, follows a trend very much comparable to negative exponential curve. With this result, one needs to compute the demand-specific resilience values at only a given number of demand levels to attain generality. Finally, the authors introduce a generalized index of resilience (GIR) incorporating the demand-spread. The authors compare the GIR to traditional network indicators and find that it is better in modeling topological and dynamic properties of a network.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE40 Critical Transportation Infrastructure Protection.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Patil, Gopal R
  • Bhavathrathan, B K
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 14p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Demand; Networks; Optimization; Roads; Sensitivity; Topology
• Uncontrolled Terms: Resilience (Adaptability)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Planning and Forecasting; I71: Traffic Theory;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01557884
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-4173
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 26 2015 5:27PM