Evaluating the significance of transportation network link for emergency supplies

The emergency supplies in large-scale natural disaster is affected by the dynamics of transportation network. The travel speed and link capacity change over time because of traffic accidents, landslides, and uncertain weather, etc., which block up the processing of emergency material transmission sometimes. Finding out critical links and knowing how these links affect the transportation are benefit to improve dispatching performance. In this paper, the quickest network flow model is utilized to calculate the significance of transportation network links. Not only the critical links could be identified, but also how much decrease of traffic volume will be caused by the decrease in critical link capacity, or travel speed, or both. Different from conventional methods, the proposed significance in this paper is not only for individual link, but also for multi-links with considering time dimension. The experimental results demonstrate that this method is effective in dynamic transportation network and the computational efficiency is acceptable.