A novel vulnerability index and approach for improving road network vulnerability

A transportation network’s recovery depends on its vulnerability to disaster impacts and functionality restoration. This study proposes two novel indexes for comprehensively measuring the vulnerability of road networks: link vulnerability measurement and node vulnerability measurement. Analyses were conducted on a hypothetical road network using dynamic assignment in the PTV VISSIM microsimulation environment, and the network vulnerabilities were calculated using the proposed methods. The results were compared with those found in the literature. Additionally, a method was proposed to reduce the vulnerability of the road network, and the proposed approach was compared with the current situation. The results showed 13.09% and 14.83% improvements in the average link vulnerability and node vulnerability values, respectively. In terms of achieving a more balanced distribution of vulnerability across the system, improvements of 5.68% and 41.35% were observed in the standard deviations of the link vulnerability and node vulnerability values, respectively.