A Multicriteria Methodology for Measuring the Resilience of Transportation Assets and Prioritizing Security Investments

Transportation project prioritization uses performance measures that are related to the transportation asset, its operations, and its environment. However, in the state of practice, evaluation does not consider directly the likelihood of natural or man-made threats, the infrastructure resilience, or the consequences of the infrastructure damage in the event that the threat occurs. Thus, during the prioritization of investments, assets of low security do not receive the due attention they deserve. In defining security as the lack of risk of damage from threats due to inherent structure or functional resilience, this paper is based on the premise that the inclusion of security considerations in prioritization introduces a much needed element of robustness in investment prioritization However, the inclusion of investment security impacts leads to an increase in the number of performance measures for the investment evaluation. This paper presents a methodology to quantify the overall security level for an asset in terms of the environmental threats it faces, its resilience or vulnerability to damage, and the consequences of the infrastructure damage. The overall framework consists of the traditional steps in risk management, and this paper's specific contribution is in the part of the framework that measures the risk. This paper applies the methodology to a given set of assets by measuring the risk (security) of each asset and prioritizing security investments across multiple assets using multiple criteria analysis.