The effect of restoration on the resilience of transportation infrastructure

Abstract

Coping with the resilience of infrastructure systems is important in order to be prepared for disruptive events such as natural hazards. It is essential to understand how and in what order damaged infrastructure objects should be restored so that they can provide adequate service again. Infrastructure managers making such decisions must also take into account other constraints such as available funds, personnel, available resources, and any external constraints, e.g. which objects on which roads should have priority. In this work, a mathematical optimization model was used to determine such a restoration program, by minimizing the direct and indirect costs of the event, considering constraints such as budget, resource and traffic flow. With this approach, a restoration programme for a real road network in Switzerland after the occurrence of an extreme flood event is investigated.