ERI: An Integrative Risk Quantification and Management Framework to Enhance the Resiliency of Surface Transportation Systems Under Disruptive Precipitation

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).Flood events are one of the most common natural disasters affecting the US. Recurring nuisance precipitation and less severe flood events affect urban environments with much higher frequency when compared to more severe events. More frequent events pose higher safety risks to public transit users, pedestrians, and drivers and cause challenges to accessing transportation infrastructure. By focusing on the less severe flood events and heavy precipitation, this Engineering Research Initiation (ERI) project provides a scalable framework that will holistically capture the impacts of a city's characteristics, infrastructures' attributes, human travel behaviors, and disruptive events' patterns on transportation resilience. The researched framework will enhance the safety and efficiency of the US surface transportation system, resulting in strong societal and economic impacts. The goal of this project is to scientifically understand surface transportation network’s risks under disruptive precipitation events and effectively communicate such risks. Further, the researched framework will provide an educational tool to teach quantitative decision-making and risk analysis and assist with computationally efficient transportation operation policy learning. Focusing on the flood-prone area of Hoboken, New Jersey, this multi-element modeling approach will promote a pragmatic decision-making platform supporting the interactions between humans and the built environment. The project harnesses knowledge from resiliency planning, risk analysis and communication, survey design, transportation engineering, graph theory and network modeling, and reinforcement learning to transform the simplified assumptions utilized in the existing transportation resiliency modeling efforts. The project will estimate and validate the local and system-wide impacts of flooding on mobility and accessibility. Upon quantifying the effects of disruptive precipitation on mobility and accessibility, and predicting road flood susceptibility, driver behavior and disruptive patterns will be evaluated and simulated during and after disruptions through scenario generation. The objective is to provide a framework that improves operational decision-making through prioritization and risk communication. The resulting framework will encompass all elements leading to disruption by precipitation in flood-prone areas and consequential travel patterns causing further hindrance and safety hazards to travel networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.