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ORCID

N/A

Access Type

Open Access Thesis

Document Type

thesis

Degree Program

Civil Engineering

Degree Type

Master of Science in Civil Engineering (M.S.C.E.)

Year Degree Awarded

2015

Month Degree Awarded

February

Abstract

Transportation networks are critical to the function of modern society but they are vulnerable to extreme events such as earthquakes. Damaged bridges can cost millions of dollars to repair and congestion and detours due to bridge closures leads to indirect costs that are even greater than the cost of repair of damaged bridges. A resilient network however should be able to limit the damage caused by earthquakes and recover in a timely fashion. Resilience of networks has been studying in length from a conceptual standpoint but as quantitative measure, the field has been lacking. This study sets forth to quantify resilience based on a set of performance measures and mapping them to the four properties of resilience: robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity. The thesis ties in concepts from risk analysis that helps determine expected damage levels and connects those concepts to a resilience framework to better understand how a network responds and recovers after an earthquake. Also explored are methods to decrease repair time in order to limit the indirect costs due to network downtime as well as an overview of pre-event methods of improving resilience with a novel method of selecting bridges for retrofit while minimizing direct and indirect losses.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/6463860

First Advisor

Alice Alipour

Second Advisor

Behrouz Shafei

Third Advisor

John Collura

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