An Integrated Framework for the Quantification of Road Network Seismic Vulnerability and Accessibility to Critical Services

Ahmad Mohamad El-Maissi, Sotirios A. Argyroudis, Moustafa Moufid Kassem, Lee Vien Leong and Fadzli Mohamed Nazri ()
Additional contact information
Ahmad Mohamad El-Maissi: School of Civil Engineering, Engineering Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Nibong Tebal, Penang 14300, Malaysia
Sotirios A. Argyroudis: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, Design and Physical Sciences, Brunel University, Uxbridge, London UB8 3PH, UK
Moustafa Moufid Kassem: School of Civil Engineering, Engineering Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Nibong Tebal, Penang 14300, Malaysia
Lee Vien Leong: School of Civil Engineering, Engineering Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Nibong Tebal, Penang 14300, Malaysia
Fadzli Mohamed Nazri: School of Civil Engineering, Engineering Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Nibong Tebal, Penang 14300, Malaysia

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 19, 1-27

Abstract: Road networks are regarded as the backbone of transportation systems, which play an important role in the social and economic prosperity of societies. Due to this reason, it is crucial to develop road networks with higher resiliency rates to operate normally during earthquake incidents. In the last decades, the research that tackled the management of disasters for road networks gained great attention, in particular by developing various seismic vulnerability assessment models. Most of those models study a single criterion, e.g., physical damage of road assets, traffic disruption, and/or functionality loss of the network without taking into consideration the combination of different vulnerability criteria. The proposed framework is part of the global seismic vulnerability assessment models that combine fragility functions and vulnerability indices, which is demonstrated by an application in a road network in the city of Penang in Malaysia. In the first step, the fragility functions are developed where their results are used to calculate the Seismic Vulnerability Index (SVI) for roadways by weighting the main investigated parameters. This is followed by investigating the Accessibility Index (AI) model that is employed to assess the accessibility of targeted districts within the investigated area. Subsequently, an integrated approach is employed to generate the emergency evacuation maps to critical service centres by referring to the correlations between vulnerability and the accessibility rates. In conclusion, the results of this study integrate engineering judgment and numerical models to create a comparative study for assessing the performance of road networks and to validate the significance of an integrated seismic assessment on various critical societal sectors, such as improving emergency accessibility and implementing better mitigation strategies for communities living in disaster-prone areas.

Keywords: accessibility index; cities disaster risk reduction; integrated framework; resilient infrastructure; vulnerability assessment; critical service centres (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/19/12474/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/19/12474/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:19:p:12474-:d:930416

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().