  Surface transportation systems are an essential part of urban transportation
infrastructure and are susceptible to damage from earthquakes. This damage,
along with the lack of prior warning of earthquake events, may lead to severe
and unexpected disruption of normal traffic patterns, which may seriously
impair post-disaster response. Accordingly, it is important to understand and
model the performance of urban transportation systems immediately following an
earthquake, to evaluate its capability to support emergency response, e.g., the
movement of firefighters, search and rescue teams and medical personnel, and
the transportation of injured people to emergency treatment facilities. For
this purpose, a scenario-based methodology is developed to model the
performance of a transportation network immediately following an earthquake
using an agent-based model. This methodology accounts for the abrupt changes in
destination, irrational behavior of drivers, unavailability of traffic
information and the impairment to traffic capacity due to bridge damage and
building debris. An illustration using the road network of Tangshan City, China
shows that the method can capture the traffic flow characteristics immediately
after an earthquake and can determine the capability of the transportation
network to transfer injured people to hospitals considering the above factors.
Thus, it can provide rational support for evaluating the performance of the
surface transportation system under immediate post-disaster emergency
conditions.
