Undergraduate Research Experience (REU), NHERI 2019: Assessing Impacts of Traffic Network Damage from Earthquakes

This project addresses the need for a rapid and accurate assessment of critical transportation networks, particularly bridges, in the aftermath of a natural hazard. Following an earthquake, the closure of bridges and roads could have a significant impact on the travel times for emergency responders. Developing a way to predict vulnerabilities in the traffic network and evaluate travel times is crucial. Using Anchorage, Alaska, as a testbed, this model examines vulnerabilities of the bridges and uses a stochastic simulation to generate estimated downtimes. The model then predicts road closures from the downtimes to establish where delays in the network will occur following a disaster scenario.