Browsing by Author "Allen, Eduardo"

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    Integration of resilience and risk to natural hazards into transportation asset management of road networks: a systematic review
    (Taylor & Francis Ltd., 2023) Allen, Eduardo; Costello, Seosamh B.; Henning, Theunis F. P.; Chamorro Giné, Marcela Alondra; Echaveguren, Tomás
    Transportation asset management is a systematic process for the operation, maintenance, and upgrade of physical transportation assets over their life cycle. Although transportation asset management has continued to evolve over the years, the integration of transportation resilience into the process is an ongoing challenge for transportation agencies. Given that natural hazard events can result in significant damage to assets as well as cascading effects on other critical networks that depend on transportation systems to operate, the importance of this challenge cannot be overstated. Consequently, this paper presents a systematic literature review on the integration of resilience and risk into transportation asset management, with a focus on road networks, in order to understand the current state of the art and practice and to identify the ongoing challenges in the field. The review specifically focuses on the integration guidelines adopted by different countries and departments of transportation, as well as the different consequence modeling approaches used, resilience metrics, and methods to integrate transportation resilience into transportation asset management. A number of research gaps in the current state of the art and practice are then highlighted, and potential future research directions are presented.
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    Risk Management of Rural Road Networks Exposed to Natural Hazards: Integrating Social Vulnerability and Critical Infrastructure Access in Decision Making
    (2025) Contreras Moya, Marta; Chamorro Giné, Marcela Alondra; Guerrero Mancilla, Nikole Fernanda; Martínez Reyes, Carolina del Pilar; Echaveguren, Tomás; Allen, Eduardo; Bronfman Cáceres, Nicolás
    Road networks play a crucial role in accessing, sourcing, and evacuating populations during extreme natural events. These issues are especially critical in rural settings, where redundancy of networks is uncommon and where the population may present significant social disparities. Traditional risk management systems have studied the risk of the road network from a physical perspective, where the probability of damage is estimated in terms of its fragility (vulnerability) and exposure given certain hazard intensity measures. However, the specialized literature increasingly suggests the development of more comprehensive risk management systems, where not only physical aspects associated with infrastructure are considered but also the social and economic characteristics of the beneficiary population. This study proposes a Vulnerability Access Index for road network decision-making that integrates social vulnerability of rural communities exposed to extreme natural events and their accessibility to nearby critical infrastructure. The proposed methodology considers three stages: Stage 1, Social Vulnerability Index based on socioeconomic variables, to which a principal component analysis is applied to identify the most determining dimensions of social vulnerability; Stage 2, Importance Index to evaluate access to critical infrastructure, and; Stage 3, Vulnerability Access Index, which is obtained as a combination of the indices estimated in the previous stages. A case study is presented in a highly exposed region to volcanic hazards in Chile. The proposed index identified links of the road network that require special attention as they provide access to highly vulnerable population and present critical access issues.
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    Sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification of a seismic risk model for road networks
    (WILEY, 2021) Allen, Eduardo; Chamorro Giné, Marcela Alondra; Poulos, Alan; Castro, Sebastian; Llera Martin, Juan Carlos de la; Echaveguren, Tomas
    Natural hazards may cause significant disruptions to road infrastructure, subsequently affecting road agencies, users, and productive activities. Despite the existence of infrastructure fragilities to seismic hazard and some operational consequences on network mobility, previous research has not modeled risk in terms of traffic disruptions and consequent travel time delays in subduction environments, analyzing the sensitivity to model parameters and quantified model uncertainty. This study proposes a risk framework to evaluate operational consequences in interurban road networks exposed to seismic hazard using travel time delays and propagate uncertainty in the model. Risk values are evaluated using Monte Carlo simulations, and uncertainty is propagated using a polynomial chaos expansion meta-model. The framework was applied to a very critical interurban network in central Chile. Results demonstrate that the parameters that most significantly influence risk are fragility, loss of road capacity, and traffic volume.
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    SIGeR-RV: A Web-Geographic Information System-Based System for Risk Management of Road Networks Exposed to Natural Hazards
    (2023) Chamorro, Alondra; Echaveguren, Tomas; Pattillo, Carlos; Contreras-Jara, Manuel; Contreras, Marta; Allen, Eduardo; Nieto, Natalia; de Solminihac, Hernan
    The consequences of natural hazards are frequently estimated by the direct cost of recovering damaged infrastructure and the indirect costs to road users, economic activities, and impacts on society. Road networks are crucial in economic systems, logistic chain continuity, accessibility, mobility, and the evacuation of population during and after extreme events. Risk management systems (RMS) are used to estimate the potential consequences of natural events and to assess strategies for risk reduction. These commonly assess hazards, assets exposure, economic losses, and risk mitigation actions, among others. The general framework of RMS can be adapted to different scenarios. Still, local characteristics, such as the types of hazards and physical assets, cannot always be directly adopted from these systems. This study discusses the development of SIGeR-RV, an RMS developed in Chile for road networks exposed to multiple natural hazards. The RMS was implemented in a web-based geographic information system platform able to display hazard maps, quantify risk levels, prioritize mitigation strategies, and estimate direct and indirect costs and social vulnerability. The content and various capacities of the system are detailed, following the steps marked in its framework. This first version of SIGeR-RV considers seismic hazard, volcanic lahars, and hydro-meteorological hazards that affect road platforms, bridges, tunnels, and cut slopes. The system currently serves as a tool for the Ministry of Public Works of Chile and other decision makers to estimate budget requirements for increasing resilience of the road network, identifying vulnerable road segments, and assessing the socioeconomical impacts of risk reduction.