Understanding Transportation Infrastructure Resilience Accounting for Uncertainty

Abstract: With the increased frequency and severity of natural disasters, there is a timely need to build resilience for our transportation infrastructure assets. Considering the four key elements of disaster management—mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery—investment in transportation infrastructure to improve resilience is a critical pathway. With limited resources, finding the optimal investment for transportation infrastructure projects is challenging, and this becomes more complex with the uncertainties involved in the occurrences and severity of the natural shocks. To address this, we conduct scenario-based analyses for natural shocks (e.g., flood, ice storm, winter storms) for Wyandotte County in Kansas, accounting for the uncertainty in the events and their impacts on the transportation road infrastructure. The analyses are conducted using the United States Department of Transportation (US DOT) developed Resilience and Disaster Recovery (RDR) tool. The goals of this research are: (a) Identify and characterize the shocks—floods and ice storms—for the region of interest (Wyandotte County); (b) Explore the vulnerability of the road networks based on available and predicted data (e.g., flood level and current conditions of the roads and bridges); and (c) Estimate the Resilience Return-On-Investment for a set of mitigation projects accounting for the uncertainties in the impact and severity of the events. The RDR tool allows the investigation of an array of user-defined scenarios to understand the bounds of impact resulting from disasters and the anticipated benefits (trip loss, congestion, emergency needs) from mitigation projects.