Toward a More Resilient Road Infrastructure

The transportation infrastructure serves as a cornerstone for economic prosperity, enabling market expansion and fostering a more efficient division of labor. Ensuring its continued functionality in the face of disruptive events is imperative. This paper introduces a practical method for assessing the functionality of road networks and outlines a procedure for estimating their resilience. While many of these disruptive events are stochastic in nature, such as natural hazards, planned maintenance interventions can also significantly impact the functionality of high-volume road networks. The proposed framework for resilience evaluation takes into account both stochastic events and planned interventions. It specifically examines the impact of recovery time on resilience, particularly in cases of stochastic disruptive events. Furthermore, the framework also separates resilience from the overall costs that are associated with achieving a certain level of resilience, facilitating a comparison between resilience levels and corresponding costs in decision-making processes. Additionally, the paper explores measures that target different aspects of resilience.