A methodology for road traffic resilience analysis and review of related concepts

Major and minor disturbances can have a considerable impact on the performance of road networks. In this respect, resilience is considered as the ability of a road section to resist and to recover from disturbances in traffic flow. In this contribution, an indicator is presented, the Link Performance Index for Resilience (LPIR), which evaluates the resilience level of individual road sections in relation to a wider road network. The indicator can be used to detect poorly resilient road sections and to analyse which underlying road and traffic characteristics cause this non-resilience. The method adds to related concepts such as robustness and vulnerability by also considering recovery from congestion events explicitly and by focussing on everyday operational traffic situations rather than just on disasters or major events. The LPIR is demonstrated in an experimental case on a real network in which the effectiveness of the method is demonstrated.