01515399

Component

Long-term climate change and catastrophic climatic events have devastating impacts on US transportation infrastructure, systems and services and, thus, huge social and economic costs within the US. To protect transport infrastructure and detect vulnerabilities, the involved systems and risks imposed on these systems have to be recognized. As transportation systems are complex systems with multi-level, multi-attribute interactions, it is essential to acknowledge and consider the interconnectivity among risks and links between subsystems. With the objective of determining the interconnectivity among transport and environment systems and assessing the spectrum of vulnerabilities, the project proposed a holistic approach to map this interconnectivity and developed a framework to depict how risks and interconnectivity among them change the spectrum of devastations. The study laid out a high-level conceptual map of interacting complex systems; then, it depicted some of the interconnections between and within these complex systems as related to climatic events. The Strategic Risk Register System (SRRS) approach is introduced to demonstrate the feasibility of capturing these interconnectivities and to model threats imposed on transport infrastructure due to the climate change events. A hypothetical episodic event was initiated to examine the credibility and ability of the proposed technique to capture the connectivity of risks. The outcomes concluded that the complexity of connectivity decreases, as the potency values increase. The outcomes can assist decision makers in transportation authority or first responders to pinpoint vulnerable sites and concentrate their efforts to safeguard sites in order to mitigate the devastation levels.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE40(6) ABE40 Paper Review Subcommittee.

01503729

14-2037

English

15p

2014

Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Climate change; Costs; Economic and social factors; Infrastructure; Risk assessment

United States

Economics; Highways; I10: Economics and Administration

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2014 Paper #14-2037

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 27 2014 2:43PM