Decision Support Tool to Assess Criticality of Transportation Networks

Assessing the importance of transportation facilities is an increasingly growing topic of interest to federal and state transportation agencies. In the wake of recent terrorist attacks and recurring manmade and natural disasters, significant steps are needed to improve security at both state and metropolitan level. This paper proposes an optimization model based on complex networks science techniques to assess the importance of transportation facilities. Travel time is used as performance measure to assess the criticality of a transportation network. We demonstrate the proposed technique both in a theoretical network (Sioux Falls network) and in a built-up network to assess the criticality of the major infrastructures that are used to access Manhattan in an AM peak hour. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the procedure to determine critical links in a transportation network.