A METHODOLOGICAL AND PROCEDURAL FRAMEWORK FOR RANKING LINKS IN VULNERABLE ROAD NETWORKS

This paper describes a methodologic and procedural framework for performing quantitative vulnerability analysis of a road network. Following advanced as well as consolidated approaches adopted by various well known transport scientists, road transport network vulnerability is interpreted as a variable that is directly related to link importance. Network simulation methods and software tools are proposed for estimating link flows and network cost differentials, under the quite sophisticated assumptions of Deterministic User Equilibrium instead of simply interpreting link costs to be constant with respect to link flows. Traffic counts are cheap data which are also suggested to be taken into consideration for both determining link vulnerability ranks and to surrogate possible lack of information regarding transport demand, which could be compensated, in total absence of data, by the application of proper gravitational models.