Integrating Intrinsic and Eccentric Seismic Vulnerability Indices to Prioritize Road Network Accessibility

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to shed light on the establishment of more resilient road networks, which can operate and interact regularly with the surrounding complex-built environment systems during various natural hazards such as earthquakes. This study is integrating engineering judgment and numerical methods to create a comprehensive evaluation for assessing the accessibility rates for road networks. Moreover, it is validating the significance of integrated seismic assessment on various critical sectors in society, such as improving emergency accessibility and adapting improved mitigation strategies for communities that live in disaster-prone districts. In this respect, this article investigates the seismic vulnerability assessment results, aiming at underpinning the understanding of road network risks by discussing the main results of the calculated probability of damage for various parameters of the roadway and its assets. A comparative study is performed to study the effect of spatially variable ground motions at different damage states for the main investigated four parameters. These extracted comparative results are used for weighting the main parameters to calculate the intrinsic seismic vulnerability index scores. Furthermore, the eccentric seismic vulnerability index is calculated, by following different steps such as assessing the calculated debris width resulting from the collapsed buildings and extracting the accessibility rates through concluding the effective width values. Subsequently, the variation between the accessibility rates is investigated and the integrated seismic risk assessment for a road system is developed with a focus on the integration between asset damage and functionality by generating integrated heat maps that take into consideration the correlation between all the developed vulnerability indices.