Dissertation Grant - Project Description:

This dissertation focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating a mixed set of strategies to enhance community and transportation infrastructure resilience against multiple hazards. The dissertation contains three thrusts. The first thrust focuses on infrastructure and proposes a novel road network risk performance metric to assess the (positive or negative) contribution of the transportation network on the population's risk in a particular city and informs about the geographic direction and concentration of the risk based on the network performance. This metric allows comparing multiple locations and identifies the most vulnerable cities and the most vulnerable directions against 18 natural hazards. The second and third thrusts focus on evacuation communities based on their risks to specific threats. The second thrust develops a linear optimization model to estimate a lower bound of the evacuation time to a set of safe locations by implementing scenarios based on the risk metric. The third thrust aims to identify and evaluate strategies to complement and support the evacuation process specific to wildfire settings by integrating wildfire progression and simulation estimates.