A stochastic multi-criteria assessment of security of transportation assets

<p>Transportation project evaluation and prioritization use traditional performance measures including travel time, safety, user costs, economic efficiency, and environmental quality. The project impacts in terms of enhancing the infrastructure resilience or mitigating the consequences of infrastructure damage in the event of disaster occurrence are rarely considered in project evaluation. This dissertation presents a methodology to address this issue so that in evaluating and prioritizing investments, infrastructure with low security can receive the attention they deserve. Secondly, the methodology can be used for evaluating and prioritizing candidate investments dedicated specifically to security enhancement. In defining security as a function of threat likelihood, asset resilience and damage consequences, this dissertation uses security-related considerations in investment prioritization thus adding further robustness in traditional evaluations. As this leads to an increase in the number of performance criteria in the evaluation, the dissertation adopts a multiple-criteria analysis approach. The methodology quantifies the overall security level for an infrastructure in terms of the threats it faces, its resilience to damage, and the consequences in the event of the infrastructure damage. The dissertation demonstrates that it is feasible to develop a security-related measure that can be used as a performance criterion in the evaluation of general transportation projects or projects dedicated specifically towards security improvement. Through a case study, the dissertation applies the methodology by measuring the risk (and hence, security) of each for bridge infrastructure in Indiana. The method was also fuzzified and a Monte Carlo simulation was run to account for unknown data and uncertainty. On the basis of the multiple types of impacts including risk impacts such as the increase in security due to each candidate investment, this dissertation shows how to prioritize security investments across the multiple infrastructure assets using multiple-criteria analysis. </p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Civil Engineering

Year

2014

Author dc:creator

• Dojutrek, Michelle Sophie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Samuel Labi
• J. Eric Dietz
• Fred L. Mannering
• Kumares C. Sinha

• Civil Engineering

Repository record dc:identifier

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/261

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:docs.lib.purdue.edu:open_access_dissertations-1302