Prioritization Framework for Rockfall Countermeasures for Rock-Cut Slopes for Rural Roads

Abstract

Rockfalls can have devastating consequences to motorists and road facilities. Over time, countermeasures have been considered technically viable to mitigate these events. Rockfall hazard assessment is one of the options to identify feasible countermeasures, including designs, based on engineering-related data analysis. Of the attempts to enhance the fundamentals and practices of efficient and reliable rockfall hazard assessment, a few of the past contributions were devoted to developing holistic approaches that can identify the best design option by prioritizing technically viable countermeasures. These measures are based on multidimensional aspects such as construction cost and time, complexity, safety, and aesthetics. This paper presents a novel holistic prioritization framework to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of feasible design options for rockfall countermeasures, focusing on rural local road rockfall applications. The framework is composed of three main steps, including rockfall hazard assessment, prioritization, and sensitivity analysis. The processes of the proposed framework are well-demonstrated in this paper through an actual case study in West Virginia. The unique feature of the framework lies in a sensitivity analysis that provides decision-makers with a statistical inference of the confidence level in choosing the top-ranked design option. This paper also presents a synthesis of the evaluation criteria necessary to prioritize the countermeasure design options identified through a rockfall hazard assessment. Herein, the applicability of the sensitivity analysis approach was further expanded to quantitative measures obtained through standard scaling techniques.