Resilience-Oriented Performance Assessment Method for Road-Traffic System: A Case Study in Beijing, China

The performance of an urban road-traffic system is affected by many factors, such as the average traffic demand, and the network structure, etc. At the same time, natural disasters, abnormal traffic volume and man-made accidents can result in disturbances which also influence the performance of the system. Resilience of an urban road-traffic system has been an emerging research field. This paper proposes a resilience-oriented performance assessment method based on a traffic flow assignment model to precisely capture the performance of an urban road-traffic system. System functionality is chosen as the key proxy for resilience, which can be calculated based on some index parameters including allocation rate of traffic flow, commuting efficiency on road sections, etc. A case study is implemented in a downtown area in Beijing, China. As to the resilience of the system when faced with huge traffic volume, the results show that the road-traffic system itself has a certain degree of absorption capacity for traffic pressure induced by huge volume. As to the resilience of the system when faced with local network failure, the results show that information dissemination of the network condition and the traffic volume are the key impact factors on system’s resilience curves.