STRUCTURAL VULNERABILITY AND RISK ASSESSMENT OF HARGHITA COUNTY’S INNER ROAD NETWORK

Structural Vulnerability and Risk Assessment of Harghita County’s Inner Road Network. Road transportation systems has become indispensable in everyday life. They have a high importance in global economic circuit, thus their vulnerability and risk analysis is indispensable. In this paper we want to make an intrinsic characterization the road network infrastructure of Harghita’s county. Our vulnerability assessment was based on the internal structure of the road network using elements from graph theory. We identified that the majority of the settlements are loosely coupled with each other, after three random edge failure the road network becomes unconnected. We also identified the heavily loaded route segments with the assumption of using the shortest distance path. These are the most vulnerable parts of road network. The failure of two of these route segments can lead to the isolation of the county seat from the other major cities. By developing a simulation environment in R we could model the consequences of any edge failure in terms of detour length and number of traveling persons which couldn’t reach their destination. Through this latter evaluation we made the risk assessment of the road network, calculating the number of traveling persons which are locked to their destination