PEER has just published Report No. 2021/09 "Use of Corridors for Decision Making in Transportation Networks in Seismic Regions." It was authored by Rodrigo I. Silva-Lopez and Jack W. Baker, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University.
PDF available at: PEER Report 2021/09 or click here for full list: PEER Reports
Abstract
This report presents the results of the study that proposes a retrofitting strategy to manage seismic risk via identification of what constitutes "Corridors” in transportation networks. We define a Corridor as a set of bridges that work together to ensure connectivity and traffic flow between areas of a region. We propose using a Markov clustering algorithm to detect Corridors, whereby it selects sets of bridges that correspond to highway and main road segments that are effective in reducing disruption when jointly retrofitted. We then use a two-stage stochastic optimization to identify corridors that can be retrofitted to efficiently reduce seismic risk. This two-stage stochastic optimization couples retrofitting actions over bridges in a Corridor with repair actions to damaged bridges after an earthquake. We observe that this Corridors-supported optimization approach yields better relative performance than retrofitting approaches that consider bridges as individual entities or rank them using PageRank. We also propose techniques for selecting parameters in the corridor selection step that perform well in the retrofit optimization.