Resilience of urban infrastructure prone to natural hazards

Abstract

Civil infrastructure systems such as transportation networks, power gridlines, water and wastewater networks, telecommunication services are vital modules creating the backbones of modern cities. Transportation networks are key components of civil infrastructure systems that can impede societal and commercial events, and impair post-disaster evacuation, response and recovery. Performance of transportation networks under natural hazards shed light on the necessity to assess their fundamental topological properties in order to provide and correlate appropriate resilience measurements to comprehend the preparedness and functionality level of such infrastructure system. Therefore, this thesis is devoted to providing network analysis functionalities for vulnerability assessment in transportation networks with respect to natural disruptive events. Through combining the Geographic Information System derived spatial data and network concepts, the vulnerability of transportation networks is evaluated and so the engineering resilience is defined along its aspects by a quantitative approach and statistical modeling of the topological graph properties. The various scenarios-based methodology is applied in the highly populated capital of Lebanon, Beirut. This topology was selected for analysis because of the susceptibility of its territory to natural events. In this context, transportation agencies, legislators, and decision-makers are better able to direct and optimize resources by prioritizing the critical network components, thus reducing the downtime in the functionality system.