Analysis of Vulnerability of Road Networks on the Basis of Graph Topology and Related Attribute Information

The safety of people and the security of the vital functions of society are among the core tasks of governments. Various networks, especially transportation networks, are important for human life. Therefore, the government should place greater emphasis on preparedness planning and mitigation actions. Much research has been done to analyse the vulnerability of road networks and most of the methods were based on analysing the topological structure of the network using only topological attributes. This paper introduces a multi-attribute value theory which can combine all the attributes’ values, not only topological but also non-topological, and weight them according to a decision maker’s preference in order to produce an overall value. This overall value is used to compute the vulnerability of a road network. A road has a higher overall value is considered more vulnerable and more effort needs to be put into preparedness in crisis management. In this paper, a decision making software package Web-HIPRE is also introduced and illustrated.