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Highway network restoration after the great flood in Thailand

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Abstract

Flood is one of the common natural phenomena anywhere. In the second half of 2011, Thailand has recently faced with the most devastating flood of her modern history. More than 3,330 national highways are damaged by this flood. Some roads are heavily destroyed while others are partially damaged and emergency relieves cannot access to the flooded areas. Food and medicine distribution in the central part of the country has by large been disrupted. As a consequence, highway restoration is an urgent responsibility of road authorities. This study presents the sequential highway network restoration decision model when budgets and resources are unknown. Highways are restored one by one in sequence. To determine an optimal restoration sequence, the model is formulated as a dynamic program where the primary objective is to sequentially restore roadways to minimize the travel demand loss for the disconnected network. Once the network is connected, the secondary objective is to sequentially restore roadways to minimize the network travel time where traffic assignment onto the network is based on user equilibrium concept. The heuristic solution method using particle swarm optimization technique is provided for practical size problems. A sample network is examined to investigate the solution characteristics. It is found that the proposed algorithm can provide good practical solutions to the sequential highway network recovery problems and is incorporated to the Thailand highway maintenance management system.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to dedicate this research to his father who passed away at the time of this flood disaster.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Highways, Bureau of Highway Maintenance Management, Sri-Ayudhaya Road, Ratchatevi, Bangkok, 10400, Thailand

    Ponlathep Lertworawanich

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  1. Ponlathep Lertworawanich
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Correspondence to Ponlathep Lertworawanich.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 3.

Table 3 Property of the case study network
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Lertworawanich, P. Highway network restoration after the great flood in Thailand. Nat Hazards 64, 873–886 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-012-0278-2

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