Mapping the relationship between accessibility and resilience in transportation: A systematic literature review

Over the past decade, transportation resilience has emerged as a central research priority, driven by increasing exposure of transport systems to natural, epidemic, and operational disruptions. Although frequently discussed alongside resilience in this growing body of work, accessibility is interpreted in diverse ways and has emerged as a prominent but conceptually unsettled concept in the literature. Despite their co-occurrence, the relationship between resilience and accessibility remains inconsistently defined and has not been systematically synthesized as the organizing focus of a review. This paper addresses this gap through a systematic literature review following the PRISMA framework, complemented by exploratory text-mining analysis. The review examines methodological approaches, application contexts, and the ways in which accessibility is positioned relative to resilience across the selected studies. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and bigram analysis are used as supplementary tools to identify broad thematic patterns in the corpus. The review provides a structured synthesis of how resilience and accessibility are interrelated across studies. The findings identify five functional relationships: accessibility as a resilience outcome, a direct resilience indicator, a component of a broader resilience model, a vulnerability or inequality diagnostic, and a resilience-enhancement mechanism. These varying interpretations highlight significant conceptual and operational inconsistencies that limit comparability and hinder the development of integrated assessment frameworks. Based on this synthesis, the paper identifies relationship-specific and cross-cutting research gaps, including the limited representation of dynamic resilience, lack of hybrid approaches, and inconsistencies in both resilience and accessibility interpretations. The study concludes by outlining future research directions toward more holistic, data-driven, and integrated frameworks for resilient transportation planning.