Assessing road network resilience in disaster areas from a complex network perspective: A real-life case study from China

Recently, resilience assessment has become a significant research topic, as it is crucial for regional disaster mitigation. It is important to identify road network resilience characteristics to improve regional traffic and handling capacity during emergencies, which ensures regional transport safety management and sustainable development. In this paper, a complex-network-based resilience assessment framework coupled with resilience curve characteristics, such as vulnerability, survivability, adaptability, responsiveness and resilience, was established. Typical Chinese regions with the most extensive disaster distribution were selected to reproduce real historical disaster scenarios for comparative analysis and research. The results showed that 1) the process of the change in the resilience of the road network during a disaster conforms to the characteristics of the resilience curve; 2) dense, homogeneous networks are more resilient than sparse, clustered networks; 3) road sections with more redundancy and substitutability are more resilient; and 4) the severity of the decline in traffic network performance in disaster areas is related to the attributes of road segments and network interference methods.