Assessing the reliability and the expected performance of a network under disaster risk

Abstract

In a disaster situation, functionality of an infrastructure network is critical for effective emergency response. We evaluate several probabilistic measures of connectivity and expected travel time/distance between critical origin-destination pairs to assess the functionality of a given transportation network in case of a disaster. The input data include the most likely disaster scenarios as well as the probability that each link of the network fails under each scenario. Unlike most studies that assume independent link failures, we model dependency among link failures and propose a novel dependency model that incorporates the impact of the disaster on the network and at the same time yields tractable cases for the computation of the probabilistic measures. We develop algorithms for the computation of the measures and utilize a Monte Carlo simulation algorithm for the intractable cases. We present a case study of the Istanbul highway system under earthquake risk, and compare different dependency structures computationally.