Performance ≠ behavior: a study in the fragility of expertise

Transportation network system plays a vital role in post-earthquake emergency, recovery, and reconstruction stage, as well as in normal situation. In recent earthquake disasters, especially in urban region, traffic capability was significantly reduced due to physical damage to transportation facilities and a surge of emergency traffic needs, resulting in degradation of urban activities and failure in post-earthquake effort. It is, therefore, a key issue to upgrade transportation network performance in earthquake disaster with better understanding on the system behavior of transportation network. The objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive model of physical and functional performance of transportation network subject to seismic failure. To enable this, contributions from various fields of engineering is necessary; multi-disciplinary effort will be made to integrate expertise in earthquake engineering, transportation engineering, and system reliability engineering.