To ensure that transport infrastructure provides acceptable levels of service with respect to extreme events, the resilience of the infrastructure needs to be estimated and targets for it need to be set. In this paper, the methodology proposed in the Foresee EU research project is presented. The methodology allows managers to measure, and set targets for, the resilience of transport systems in all situations. It requires clear definition of the transport system and how the service provided and the resilience are to be measured. The methodology allows consideration of the fact that transport infrastructure managers need to estimate resilience with various degrees of accuracy depending on the specific problem to be addressed, the time frame at disposition and the expertise available. These various levels of accuracy are covered by proposing the use of (a) simulations, (b) indicators whose values are directly related to increases in expected restoration intervention costs and reductions in service, and (c) the percentage of fulfilment of indicators. Once resilience has been estimated, the methodology provides guidance on how to set resilience targets with or without cost–benefit analysis. For demonstration, the explanation of the steps of the guideline is supported by their use for a simple transport system.
1 December 2021 in Infrastructure Asset Management
To ensure that transport infrastructure provides acceptable levels of service with respect to extreme events, the resilience of the infrastructure needs to be estimated and targets for it need to be set. Recent work in the European research project Future Proofing Strategies for Resilient Transport Networks against Extreme Events (Foresee) has shown how this can be done in situations with a wide range of available data, time frames for the estimation and expertise. This paper provides an example of how an infrastructure manager can use the guideline to estimate the resilience of, and set resilience targets for, an example transport system in a relatively short period of time, even in the case of limited expertise in all the relevant areas and limited knowledge and information on all the basic input variables. The example is fictive but realistic. It is based on a transport system consisting of a section of the A16 highway, in Italy, where a potential landslide could discharge enough material to damage road sections and bridges. The resilience is estimated using resilience indicators with differentiated weights, and the resilience targets are set using cost–benefit analysis, to identify the indicators to be improved first.
This research introduces a new method for creating synthetic Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) datasets from transport microsimulation models. The process involves modeling detailed vehicle interactions, trajectories, and characteristics from the PTV VISSIM transport microsimulation tool. It then applies the Flamant–Boussinesq approximation to simulate the resulting ground deformation detected by virtual fiber-optic cables. These synthetic DAS signals serve as large-scale, scenario-controlled, labeled datasets on training machine learning models for various transport applications. We demonstrate this by training several U-Net convolutional neural networks to enhance spatial resolution (reducing it to half the original gauge length), filtering traffic signals by vehicle direction, and simulating the effects of alternative cable layouts. The methodology is tested using simulations of real road scenarios, featuring a fiber-optic cable buried along the westbound shoulder with sections deviating from the roadside. The U-Net models, trained solely on synthetic data, showed promising performance (e.g., validation MSE down to 0.0015 for directional filtering) and improved the detectability of faint signals, like bicycles among heavy vehicles, when applied to real DAS measurements from the test site. This framework uniquely integrates detailed traffic modeling with DAS physics, providing a novel tool to develop and evaluate DAS signal processing techniques, optimize cable layout deployments, and advance DAS applications in complex transportation monitoring scenarios. Creating such a procedure offers significant potential for advancing the application of DAS in transportation monitoring and smart city initiatives.
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Planning, design, data analytics, modeling, simulation, evaluation, and implementation systems engineer.
Planning, design, data analytics, modeling, simulation, evaluation, and implementation systems engineer.