Structured expert judgment to understand the intrinsic vulnerability of traffic networks

Abstract

The concept of intrinsic vulnerability of a traffic network is defined for the first time in this paper. Intrinsic vulnerability is the susceptibility to incidents characterised by a probability of occurrence in space and time of difficult estimation, which can result in considerable reduction or loss of the system functionality. Given the nature of this type of vulnerability, its assessment might arise as a major problem. Therefore, this paper investigates the assessment of the intrinsic vulnerability of a traffic network through a set of quantifiable indicators, i.e., accessibility and reliability. Moreover, it is of interest to determine whether the selected indicators are sufficient to assess the intrinsic vulnerability or if there is any significant missing aspect to be considered. A new methodology based on structured elicitation of multivariate uncertainty from experts is presented to address these issues, allowing the estimation of the intrinsic vulnerability and its probabilistic relationship with the indicators accessibility and reliability. Although applied to the case of the metric intrinsic vulnerability, the proposed methodology emerges as an effective tool to understand other traffic descriptors of difficult evaluation such as resilience.