Suggested Citation:
Liu, Changzheng (2007) Stochastic Models for Transportation Network Protection: Final Progress Report. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, Research Report UCD-ITS-RR-07-48

Transportation infrastructure networks are under risk of nature disasters such as earthquakes. Pre-disaster retrofit has proved to be one of effective measures to enhance system resilience and thus mitigate disaster loss. This research studies the problem of allocating limited retrofit resources to competing network components given budget constraints. A specific form of research questions is which bridges (or tunnels) should be retrofitted subject to budget limitation in order to minimize disaster loss.

Current practice of prioritizing retrofit activities is to rank facilities according to their importance (e.g. measured by daily traffic volume carried by facilities) and vulnerability under seismic hazard. This ranking method fails to consider interdependency among network components and disaster uncertainty. The goal of this research is to develop a rigorous methodology that optimizes the allocation of retrofit resources to most critical transportation facilities.