reliability

Accessibility Analysis of Risk Severity

| David Levinson

Recently published:

Accessibility loss by time threshold when highlighted link is removed.
Accessibility loss by time threshold when highlighted link is removed.

Abstract:

Risk severity in transportation network analysis is defined as the effects of a link or network failure on the whole system. Change accessibility (reduction in the number of jobs which can be reached) is used as an integrated indicator to reflect the severity of a link outage. The changes of accessibility before-and-after the removing of a freeway segment from the network represent its risk severity. The analysis in the Minneapolis – St. Paul (Twin Cities) region show that links near downtown Minneapolis have relative higher risk severity than those in rural area. The geographical distribution of links with the highest risk severity displays the property that these links tend to be near or at the intersection of freeways. Risk severity of these links based on the accessibility to jobs and to workers at different time thresholds and during different dayparts are also analyzed in the paper. The research finds that network structure measures: betweenness, straightness and closeness, help explain the severity of loss due to network outage.

Keywords: Accessibility, Vulnerability, Network structure, Betweenness 

Evaluation in a Time of Uncertainty

| David Levinson

I was recently in Copenhagen, where I gave a keynote talk at the UNITE Conference (Uncertainty in Transport Evaluation) at DTU. My thanks to the organizers for inviting me. (I really liked Copenhagen, more on that in a later post).

My talk was titled: Evaluation in a Time of Uncertainty

Abstract: We live in a world where the future is increasingly unpredictable. How should we evaluate transportation investments? Should we even try to evaluate investments in advance? What do we know about what people value? This talk will consider directions in transportation evaluation, and suggestions for better decision-making given uncertainty.

The slide deck is here.

The essential tension in my presentation is the hypothesis that essentially “Long-term forecasting is impossible” vs. my argument that forecasting can only be improved if we “Make forecasters responsible for forecasts.”

Investing for Reliability and Security in Transportation Networks

| David Levinson

Recently published:
Zhang, Lei, and David M. Levinson (2008) Investing for Reliability and Security in Transportation Networks. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board #2041 pp.1-10 [doi]

Alternative transportation investment policies can lead to very different network forms in the future. The desirability of a transportation network should be assessed not only by its economic efficiency but also reliability, because the cost of incidental capacity loss in a road network can be massive. This research concerns how investment rules shape the hierarchical structure of roads, and affects network fragility with regard to natural disasters, congestion, and accidents and vulnerability to targeted attacks. A microscopic network growth model predicts the equilibrium road networks under two alternative policy scenarios: investment based on benefit cost analysis or bottleneck removal. A set of Monte-Carlo simulation runs, in which a certain percentage of links are removed according to the type of network degradation analyzed, are carried out to evaluate the equilibrium road networks. It is found that hierarchy exists in road networks for reasons such as economic efficiency, but an overly hierarchical structure has serious reliability problems. Throughout the equilibrating or evolution process, the studied grid network under benefit cost analysis has better efficiency performance, as well as error and attack tolerance. The policy implication from these findings is that benefit-cost analysis should be preferred to myopic bottleneck-removal type of investment rules, no matter how the planning horizon is specified.
Keywords: Transportation network dynamics, road growth model, reliability, vulnerability, fragility, road investment and financing policy