The Evaluation of Road Network Vulnerability in Mountainous Areas: A Case Study

Federico Rupi (), Silvia Bernardi (), Guido Rossi () and Antonio Danesi ()

Networks and Spatial Economics, 2015, vol. 15, issue 2, 397-411

Abstract: This paper deals with the issue of road network vulnerability, with special reference to a mountainous area case. It describes the implementation of a methodology that ranks links of a network according to their importance in maintaining a proper connectivity between all origin-destination pairs. Such a ranking can be particularly helpful in prioritising maintenance investments to be planned along the links of a road network. Following a conceptual approach observed in transport literature, we consider vulnerability to be connected to importance, i.e. a measure of the consequences of the collapse of a network element. In the present study we introduce a new definition of importance – with respect to a given link – that simultaneously includes two aspects: its level of usage, i.e. how many people typically use the link when travelling in a given time window, and the impact that the closure of that link could have on the general functionality of the network as a whole. The methodology proposed was implemented in order to obtain a ranking of importance for the links of a real-scale network, i.e. the road network of the Province of Bolzano, a highly mountainous area located in the Italian Alps. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Vulnerability; Reliability; Robustness; Importance; Road networks; Global importance; Local importance; Importance indicator (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11067-014-9260-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:netspa:v:15:y:2015:i:2:p:397-411

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11067/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11067-014-9260-8

Access Statistics for this article

Networks and Spatial Economics is currently edited by Terry L. Friesz

More articles in Networks and Spatial Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().