Quantifying economic and environmental impacts of transportation network disruptions with dynamic traffic simulation

Several transportation network vulnerability models have been proposed. However, most only consider disruptions as a static snapshot in time and the impact on total travel time. These approaches cannot consider the time-varying nature of travel demand nor other undesirable outcomes that follow from transportation network disruptions. This paper proposes an algorithmic approach to assess the vulnerability of a transportation network that considers the time-varying demand with an open source dynamic transportation simulation tool. The open source nature of the tool allows us to systematically consider many disruption scenarios and quantitatively compare their relative criticality. This is far more efficient than traditional approaches which would require days or weeks of a transportation engineers time to manually set up, run, and assess these simulations. In addition to travel time, we also collect statistics on additional fuel consumed and the corresponding carbon dioxide emissions. Our approach, thus provides a more systematic approach that is both time-varying and can consider additional negative consequences of disruptions for decision makers to evaluate.