Research Projects

Road networks are often disrupted by natural disasters, traffic incidents, system failures, road blocks, and special events. Understanding their resilience is crucial for maintaining continuity and ensuring efficient movement of goods and people. However, research on road network resilience in India is limited due to a lack of reliable traffic data. Technological advancements have led to the widespread use of smartphones on a global scale, which can collect user locations, travel patterns, and journey durations and speeds using crowdsourced data. This project aims to use crowdsourced data and simulation to evaluate and compare the resilience of Indian cities. The data-based approach collects indicators such as speed and travel time from crowdsourced data providers to assess whether a network can maintain a certain level of performance in the face of disruptions. The key questions answered through this approach include which city or parts of the city is more resilient in terms of day-to-day congestion, which city has slower congestion propagation and which city has faster dissipation, what makes a city more resilient, and the impacts of past and ongoing disasters. The simulation-based approach creates hypothetical disruption scenarios and measures the impacts in various Indian cities through macro simulation exercises. The goal is to evaluate the sensitivity of road network performance to different scales of disasters, identifying the key factors that affect their performance and functionality during and after disruptions. This research will help authorities with traffic management, disaster simulation, and disaster response strategies.