Research Objectives

Objective 2:

Prioritisation and Deployment of Physical and Human Resources

Goal: Develop a decision support tool that can be used following a hazard event for prioritising physical response and recovery of networked infrastructure. Prioritisation of repairs across damaged networks is an issue for many lifeline providers. The road network has been chosen as the case study because of its importance as a key lifeline in the aftermath of a hazard event.

This objective will focus on the following issues:

How information is collected and communicated during response and recovery activities at present, and which aspects of this process are effective or less effective?
What are the information requirements of different stakeholders during response and recovery activities, and how can data collection activities and analysis be prioritised to meet these requirements.
How is information and decision-making shared between organisations, particularly where critical links cross organisational boundaries (such as State Highways interfacing with major urban arterials), and how might be process be better facilitated in the future?
Scope and develop a decision-support tool for road managers that help them to assimilate actual damage information as it is received and to optimise the deployment of available resources and prioritise infrastructure repairs.

Lead researchers and their specialist areas

Andre Dantas: Objective Leader
Transport modelling, logistics, application of GIS and Neural Networks in transportation-related problems
Erica Seville (nee Dalziell): Risk balancing, natural hazard risk assessment in road network evaluation
Alan Nicholson: Transportation planning, risk evaluation and management for transport systems

Target Research Outputs

Analysis of Information Flows and Requirements during Response and Recovery Activities for the Road Network

Significant challenges exist for collecting, collating, and communicating information about the real-time status of the road network in times of major disruption.

Generalising the Methodology so that it is Repeatable

Taking the techniques and principles developed for the road network and looking at how they might be applied more generally to other types of networked infrastructure and industry sectors.

An Optimisation Procedure for Prioritising Works on Networked Infrastructure

Networked infrastructure provides unique challenges in optimising in real time response and recovery activities as the importance of any one particular link will be dependent on the availability of alternative links across the network. The prioritisation will need to capture the relative impacts that closure of different parts of the network have on the community. The optimisation procedure will be developed in years 3-5 of the research programme.