Recent Advances in Modeling the Vulnerability of Transportation Networks

Abstract

It is well known that for major infrastructure networks such as electricity, gas, railway, road, and urban water networks, disruptions at one point have a knock-on effect throughout the network. There is an impressive amount of individual research projects examining the vulnerability of critical infrastructure network. However, there is little understanding of the totality of the contribution made by these projects and their interrelationships. This makes their review a difficult process for both new and established researchers in the field. To address this issue, a two-step literature review process is used to provide an overview of the vulnerability of the transportation network in terms of four main themes—research objective, transportation mode, disruption scenario, and vulnerability indicator—involving the analysis of related articles from 2001 to 2013. Two limitations of existing research are identified: (1) the limited amount of studies relating to multilayer transportation network vulnerability analysis, and (2) the lack of evaluation methods to explore the relationship between structure vulnerability and dynamical functional vulnerability. In addition to indicating that more attention needs to be paid to these two aspects in the future, the analysis provides a new avenue for the discovery of knowledge, as well as an improved understanding of transportation network vulnerability.