Disaster Management Functions of Transportation and Telecommunication Systems

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This project aims at developing engineering and socio-economic methodologies for realising appropriate level of disaster management functions of transportation and telecommunication systems under earthquake emergency.Transportation and telecommunication were heavily damaged when Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake occurred. Concerning with transportation systems, importance of evaluation of the systems as a whole network is recognised. Not only connectivity reliability index that simply evaluates whether an origin-destination pair is connected but also travel time reliability index that evaluates the performance of the transportation systems are needed to discuss performance of the transportation systems in an emergency. The functionality of telecommunication systems heavily degraded because of destruction of some equipments and heavy congestion on a public telephone circuit. This functional degradation influenced the emergency and restoration activities. Telecommunication systems should have functioned as a means of controlling the urban systems. Fragility of the telecommunication systems among organs comparing with robustness of telecommunication systems within an organ was recognised as a large problem. Furthermore, in carrying out the anti-earthquake countermeasures for transportation/telecommunication systems to improve the reliability of the systems, the socio-economic evaluation of investment is needed.A multi-disciplinary research team comprising experts in lifeline earthquake engineering, transportation systems planning, and social system analysis is working in the development of methodologies through reconnaissance of actual disaster, network analysis, simulation of disaster processes, development of GIS based information management systems, and econometric analysis.