AN EXPLORATION OF SOCIAL VULNERABILITY, EXPOSURE, AND FREIGHT TRANSPORT NETWORK DISRUPTION IN THE MID-ATLANTIC REGION

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Delgado, Luis
- Graduate Program:
- Civil Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- June 07, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Caitlin A Grady, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Alfonso Ignacio Mejia, Committee Member
Patrick Fox, Program Head/Chair
Vikash V. Gayah, Committee Member - Keywords:
- social vulnerability
food
energy
and water security
food security
disruption exposure
freight transportation network
vulnerable communities
emergency response planning
inequality
network vulnerability analysis - Abstract:
- Freight transportation infrastructure is crucial to economic prosperity and the functioning of modern society, but unanticipated events (e.g. weather-induced hazards), human-caused accidents, and/or malicious attacks can disable or reduce the capacity of components of the system (e.g. bridges & roads/highways segments). To ensure movement and access of agricultural/food commodities, there has been an increasing interest to assess the impact of failures on transportation networks. While transportation vulnerability and disaster risk management assessments often provide probable impacts of disruptions, very few planners and researchers consider societal equity dimensions that inform unequal impacts on communities. Impacts of disruptions can differ between urban and rural areas, hence, to promote equity and regional development, an integrated analysis approach that considers both physical transportation network and social vulnerability to perturbations is proposed. This framework will help us discover critical locations that influence disruption to food-flow commodities due to road network perturbations, and identify communities that are socially intolerant to access loss to food, water, and energy resources. Discovering the most vulnerable communities may inform emergency response planning by prioritizing those areas for resource allocations to reduce the societal impact of the loss of accessibility. Knowledge of the vulnerability of freight transportation networks allows us to assess transport behaviors, identify critical components, and devise contingency plans for future resilience. Utilizing datasets that describe county-scale commodity flow and freight mobility performance, we built and examined a roadway network in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and associated flows that could be subject to disruptions. To quantify vulnerability to commodity flow disruptions, we constructed a social vulnerability index (SoVI) whose objective is to understand the spatial variability of household food, energy, and water insecurity in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. We determined the communities that are most exposed to risk from failures and compared their importance with SoVI measures to describe consequences with ethical implications. The results of the network’s performance of vulnerability impact and exposure against various disruption scenarios indicate that it is robust against random failures but vulnerable to deliberate attacks (e.g. nodes/edges that transport the highest/maximum total amount of food flow). Overall SoVI scores denote that the most vulnerable counties are located in Philadelphia County (Philadelphia), PA, and Essex County (Newark), NJ. By integrating the counties’ scores and rankings for both network vulnerability and SoVI, we identified the most vulnerable communities (High exposure-High SoVI). Discovering the most vulnerable communities may inform emergency response planning by prioritizing those areas for resource allocations to reduce the societal impact of the loss of accessibility.