Multi-criteria based approach to identify critical links in a transportation network

A wide range of disruptive events occur on transportation networks which have intense impacts on network users’ travel time. Moreover, limited funds is forcing national, regional and local governments to carefully prioritize their investments. Therefore, reliable quantitative tools are needed to help decision-makers in choosing their investments so that the allocation of available resources is optimized. In this research, the authors attempt to understand the relative importance of links in a road network and suggest a methodology to rank the links according to three importance factors while combining the network improvement investment decision and subsequent network user response in a feedback loop. The first factor is based on the link flows at equilibrium. The second factor is based on the importance of facilities served. The third factor is based on the number of origin-destination pairs served by a link. The proposed methodology is demonstrated with a small test network and with real scale transportation network. Sensitivity analysis is performed using various budget scenarios and it is found that with the increase in budget the ranking of critical links changes