Redundancy importance: Links as rerouting alternatives during road network disruptions

We consider the importance of road links as backup alternatives when other links in the network are disrupted (due to events such as floods, landslides, car accidents etc.). While traditional measures of link importance capture a link's role for transport efficiency under normal conditions, we are interested in a link's role for transport robustness and network redundancy. We refer to this concept as redundancy importance and introduce two measures based on traffic flow and disruption impacts (here operationalized as travel delay), respectively. In the flow-based measure we consider the net traffic flow that is redirected to the studied link when other links are closed. In the impact-based measure we also consider the impact that is avoided through the studied link, i.e., how much worse the next-best backup alternatives would be if the studied link itself would not be available. We argue that although a link may not be important under normal conditions, a higher prioritization in resource allocations could be justified if many users could come to rely on it in extraordinary situations. Hence, these measures should be useful as quantitative decision support in the allocation of resources for investments and maintenance as well as for setting up pre-emptive rerouting plans. The measures are applied in a case study of northern Sweden and the general characteristics that determine which links are redundancy important are identified. (C) 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd