Technical Resilience of an Urban Road Network after an Earthquake

The technical resilience of an urban road network determines the efficiency and speed of rescue activities after an earthquake. Rescue activities require an efficient urban road network in order to transport important relief supplies, casualties, and rescue teams. It is, therefore, critical to ensure the technical resilience of an urban road network in response to seismic shock. This paper proposes a quantitative methodology for assessing the technical resilience of an urban road network following an earthquake. Travel time reliability is used to measure said technical resilience, presenting changes to this reliability over time. Using the changes in travel time reliability after an earthquake, this paper calculates the loss in technical resilience and three capacities of technical resilience: absorptive capacity, adaptive capacity, and restorative capacity. A test urban road network is simulated to implement the quantitative process. This paper proposes a ranked benchmark of technical resilience loss based on the test urban road network to determine which measure is needed for the test urban road network. These analysis results could help to identify the potential risk of urban road networks in advance, particularly at regular intervals, as well as the vulnerability of a city's urban road networks, ultimately contributing to the implementation of the proper measures to improve vulnerable areas.