Evaluating resilience in urban transportation systems for sustainability: A systems-based Bayesian network model

This paper proposes a hierarchical Bayesian network model (BNM) to quantitatively evaluate the resilience of urban transportation systems. Based on systemic thinking and taking a sustainability perspective, we investigate the long-term resilience of the road transportation systems in four cities in China from 1998 to 2017, namely Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing, respectively. The model takes into account various factors collected from multi source data platforms involved in stages of design, construction, operation, management, and innovation in road transportation systems. We test the model with the forward inference, sensitivity analysis, and backward inference. The result shows that the overall resilience scores of all four cities' transportation systems are within a moderate range with values between 49% to 59%. Although they all have an ever-increasing economic level, the levels of transportation resilience in Beijing and Tianjin decrease first and then gradually increase in a long run, which indicates a strong multi-dimensional, dynamic, and non-linear characteristic in resilience economic coupling effect. Additionally, the results obtained from the sensitivity analysis and backward inference suggest that decision makers should pay more attention to the capabilities of quickly rebuilding and making changes to cope with future disturbances. As an exploratory study, this study clarifies the concepts of long-term multi-dimensional resilience and specific hazard-related resilience and provides an effective decision-support tool for stakeholders when building resilient infrastructure.