Seismic Resilience of Transportation Networks with Deteriorating Components

Performance assessment of a transportation network is naturally a complicated problem. This is mainly due to the fact that such a spatially distributed network is subjected to a variety of natural hazards and environmental stressors while it consists of a range of components with different ages. Among various components of a transportation network, bridges are known to be the most important but vulnerable components. Previous efforts to investigate the functionality of transportation networks, especially after earthquake events, have proven that damage to highway bridges may directly cause a major degradation in the functionality of the entire network. Considering the extensive socioeconomic consequences of network disruptions, the main focus of the current study is on the seismic resilience assessment of highway bridge networks exposed to deterioration processes. While this study provides a comprehensive computational framework to include several sources of uncertainty that must be taken into account to estimate the level of seismic risk, a special effort has been made to examine the effect of aging mechanisms on the obtained resilience measures. This new aspect provides more realistic estimates of the postevent functionality of transportation networks and can be immediately employed to identify appropriate restoration strategies.