Tag Archives: transportation lifelines

No grit No roads No show?

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today’s rather cryptic title reflects on the impacts of the current winter weather, and is a fitting follow-up to yesterday’s article on the security of supply. The UK transportation systems seems to be particularly suffering under heavy loads of snow, and now they seem to be running out of salt and grit for their snowed-in roads. No grit means no cleared roads means no one able to get anywhere and a no-show of people everywhere.

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Security and continuity of supply

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

Aah…the intricacies of the English language. Not supply (chain) security, but the security of supply, as in the continuity of supply. Do you see the difference? This conference paper comes from three Finnish researchers, working with VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and was presented at ESREL 2007, a conference that will spark many posts on this blog. Today’s paper describes how Finland views logistics and supply as important to national security and how the LOGHU project was created to develop a framework for identification and ranking of threats and corresponding countermeasures. While the paper clearly shows that the project is still a work in progress, much wisdom and food for thought can be drawn from it.

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Road Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-11

Today we are going back in time, to one of the seminal articles in road vulnerability. Katja Berdica‘s 2002 article, An introduction to road vulnerability: what has been done, is done and should be done has laid the groundwork for many researchers, and has cited by not few authors since it was first published. It is a conceptual paper that provides the basis for why road vulnerability needs to be a more important issue than it usually is considered as. It is also the first paper to develop a framework for measuring road vulnerability.

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Transportation Lifelines and Critical Infrastructure

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Revised on: 2015-09-03

This is the first paper that sparked my research interest in transportation vulnerability, and what would later become the focus area of my research: the cost of transportation vulnerability and the benefit of transportation reliability. It was published almost ten years ago, in 2001: Risk and Impact of Natural Hazards on a Road Network by Erica Dalziell and Alan Nicholson from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. As far as I am aware of, the Dalziell-Nicholson paper is one of the first attempts to calculate a cost benefit ratio for road closure versus mitigation investments, where the road is seen as a transportation lifeline, and thus a critical infrastructure for the communities that it links.

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Bad locations = bad logistics?

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

How are companies located in sparse transport networks affected by supply chain disruptions? This article develops a new framework for the categorization of supply chains, and introduces the notion of the constrained supply chain. Within the constrained supply chain framework, a company can address its locational disadvantage by either redesigning the supply chain towards a better structure, in order to gain better location, or by redesigning the supply chain towards a better organization, in order to gain better preparedness.

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Highway Vulnerability and Criticality Assessment

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Transportation vulnerability and resilience have been the focus of this blog for the past two days, first looking at Engineering Tranportation Lifelines and then Are roads more important than computers? Today I have a third article that relates to this subject: Assessing the vulnerability and criticality of the highway system. In 2002, AASHTO (the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) published a guideline on how to perform such an assessment, and I had almost forgotten about it, but it came back to me when I was researching my two previous posts. What makes this report worth posting about is the clear and distinct separation of the terms vulnerability and criticality.

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Are roads more important than computers?

Revised on: 2015-09-10

Critical Infrastructure. Which is more important – or ‘critical’ – road networks or computers? What if one day you could no longer use your computer or the Internet for one month, but you could still go anywhere by car? Or what if one day you could no longer go anywhere by car for one month, but you still had your computer or the Internet up and running, which would be worse? I would rather live without computers than without roads…

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Engineering transportation lifelines

Revised on: 2011-02-25

New Zealand is probably not the fist country that comes to mind when thinking of state-of-the-art transportation lifeline engineering. Nonetheless, I think it is time to consider New Zealand as being one of the countries at the very forefront. A 2008 research project, initiated by the New Zealand Transport Agency, provides a close look at how New Zealand practices lifelines engineering. The report is well-written, to the point and provides insight sand recommendations that are applicable not only to New Zealand, but to road and transport authorities anywhere.

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When disaster strikes…

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Revised on: 2011-03-10

…how does the transportation network recover? And why are transportation networks so essential to disaster recovery? Ho do effective transportation networks contribute to the recovery effort? Is recovery even possible without a functioning transportation network? This was the topic of a session I attended at TRB 2009 this week. Although this session was mainly aimed at US transportation agencies, the introduction to the panel discussion had some key points I would like to reiterate here.

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Sparse transportation networks – a nightmare

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Now it has happened again. Hardly a week goes by in Norway without a major supply chain disruption. Now the main (and practically only) highway beween the Northern and Southern part of Norway has been interrupted, prompting long detours on smaller roads. Not only that, the in fact only rail line between Trondheim and Bodø has been interrupted as well, a rail line that transports much of the goods between North and South Norway and is a major freight corridor. Normally, eight large freight trains pass every day. The irony is that this happened during construction work aimed at improving said road. In fact, this is the second time this year; in June the road and rail were closed for 12 days. This time, it’s looking like a couple of WEEKS!

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America’s Crumbling Infrastructure

Revised on: 2015-11-17

My daily morning routine includes a cup of coffee while watching the World Business Report on BBC World News. Today they had a special report on America’s crumbling and failing infrastructure. The 2005 Report Card for America’s infrastructure issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) leaves no doubt: It’s a D. Is America’s critical infrastructure in critical condition?

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Norwegian roads are dangerous!

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

I just learned from the news this evening, while writing on a rather dull post for this blog, that a rockfall has hit one of major roads in this region, Rv 70 in Sunndal. Rockfall is not an unknown event in Norway, especially not in this region, where roads undulate precariously along high mountains, and where the only “escape” is a dive into freezing cold waters. The road in question has a long history of rockfalls and the incident has cut off the most direct route between the coastal city of Kristiansund and Eastern Norway, but fortunately a detour route is available. In Norway’s sparse transportation network that is not always the case, and closed roads mean additional travel costs not only to the ordinary traveller (i.e. tourist), but most importantly to businesses, who then have no alternative for shipping their goods to their customers, or receiving their goods from their suppliers.

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Accessibility Index – Transport Network Vulnerability

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Revised on: 2015-09-08

I had the pleasure of meeting M.A.P. Taylor at the 3rd International Symposium on Transport Network Vulnerability (INSTR 2007). His research has many bearings towards my own research in that it is concerned with transport network vulnerability in sparse rural and remote networks. In his 2006 paper, Application of Accessibility Based Methods for Vulnerability Analysis of Strategic Road Networks, Taylor and his fellow contributors develop a methodology for assessing the socio-economic impacts of transport network degradation by using the change in accessibility prior to and after degradation of the road network as a measure for the importance or criticality of the road link.

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How New Zealand develops resilient organisations

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Is New Zealand better prepared for a disaster than other countries? As our infrastructure and organizations become ever more networked and interdependent there is a growing need to focus on managing overall system risk. In particular, there is a need to focus not only on the vulnerability of our systems to failure, but also on our ability to manage and minimize the impact of any failures. New Zealand has realized this and is currently halfway through a six year research project designed to assist organizations in recovering their economic competitiveness after hazard events.

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Pålitelighet og sårbarhet av transportsystemer

Revised on: 2011-05-18

Transportsystemer som veg og jernbane danner ryggraden i et moderne samfunn. Påliteligheten og sårbarheten i et transportsystem blir dermed avgjørende faktorer ikke bare i konkurranse- og markedsøyemed, men også i beredskapssammenheng, for å kunne opprettholde normal samfunnsdrift. Dette er den norske oversettelsen/tilpasningen av The reliability and vulnerability of transportation lifelines, skrevet av Jan Husdal ved University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA, i 2002. Videreutviklet i 2008: Er rassikring lønnsomt?

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The reliability and vulnerability of transportation lifelines

Revised on: 2015-11-17

How can we assess how reliable or vulnerable the transportation is, and which parameters can we apply in measuring reliability and vulnerability? Transportation networks like freeways and interstate highways are the main backbone of modern society. Consequently, the reliability or vulnerability of any transportation network is thus a decisive factor not only in terms of market outreach and competition, but also in terms of continuity, to ensure a 24/7 operation of the community we live in. This research essay takes a closer look at vulnerability and reliability issues in transportation networks.

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A spatial framework for modeling hazards to transportation lifelines

Revised on: 2011-07-22

Transportation networks are exposed to a wide range of natural hazards and this study has developed a GIS tool for analyzing these hazards. The primary hazards included in this study are avalanches, landslides, flooding, earthquakes, wildfires, and rockfall. Although the primary focus of this research is roads, it is equally applicable to other transportation lifelines, such as railways, canals/waterways, or transmission lines for power, gas or oil. This presentation provides an overview of the spatial framework, current results and limitations, and directions for further research. MFworks was used as a GIS tool, along with a self-developed Java application.

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