Modeling Earthquake Vulnerability of Highway Networks

In this study, we investigate the earthquake vulnerability of highway networks whose links are subject to failure. We propose a model called α-conservative failure model that aims to capture the dependency among link failures in the event of an earthquake. According to this model, we calculate a path-based accessibility measure to assess the expected weighted average shortest distance to serve a unit demand after the earthquake. We test the proposed link failure model on a case study of the earthquake vulnerability in Istanbul.