Disaster Risk Assessment Scheme—A Road System Survey for Budapest

Abstract

This study presents a method to analyze the most critical elements of the public road system concerning outer effects which hinder the normal operation of the whole system. The surveyed public road network in Budapest, Hungary is studied as a graph: Dijkstra’s algorithm is applied to find the shortest path, and the Boykov-Kolmogorov method is used to calculate the maximum flow of the network. Those elements are identified whose damage can critically influence the operation of the network, and where the infrastructure available for rescue teams has a bottleneck. Finally, the Wilcoxon post hoc test was applied with Bonferroni correction. The tests have proven that the new method can successfully identify the critical vulnerabilities of the network to determine its weak points by considering reduced road capacities and the increased needs for transportation arising due to a disaster. This pilot study confirmed that after the elimination of the problems in statistical methods, the new framework can robustly identify those road network elements whose development is of key importance from a disaster management perspective.