DARe showcases transport resilience modelling at TRB 2026

TRB is a leading organisation in transportation research and provides valuable resources and expertise. The Annual Meeting attracts thousands of professionals (including policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers, and representatives of government, industry, and academic institutions) from around the world.  

The presented poster, An Agent-based Integrated Modelling Framework with Metrics for Assessing Transport Resilience to Heavy Rainfall: Covering Road Disruption and Ripple Effects, focuses on an integrated modelling framework, part of DARe’s Integrated Modelling Platform (IMP). The framework combines rainfall modelling, surface water flood modelling, and agent-based transport modelling (AgBM) to simulate both road asset-level disruptions and user behavioural responses, proposing multidimensional performance metrics to quantify disruption impacts from physical, operational, environmental, social, and economic perspectives. 

This methodology was demonstrated through a case study of the Tyne and Wear region in North East England, using a 1-in-30-year rainfall event. In addition to a baseline scenario, three behaviour scenarios are simulated under the rainfall event, including a worst-case scenario where individuals are unable to adapt their behaviours, an ideal response scenario where individuals iteratively adjust their activity plans to avoid flooded road links, and an early warning scenario where a subset of individuals cancels trips in advance in response to flood warnings. Results indicate notable differences across the three scenarios, with ideal response and early warning cases showing considerable reductions in journey delay, trip cancellation, and economic loss across trip purposes and demographic groups. These findings highlight the significant potential of behavioural adaptation in enhancing transport resilience during heavy rainfall. The proposed framework, together with the performance metrics, offers a transferable approach for stress-testing rainfall scenarios and evaluating the effectiveness of resilience interventions, supporting evidence-based planning for climate-resilient transport systems. 

The Annual TRB Meeting was held in Washington, D.C., in January. Dr Wei Bi presented a poster explaining the whole developed methodology. It attracted a lot of interest from researchers, transport authorities, and practitioners, particularly in the overall framework for simulating the impact of extreme rainfall events with AgBMs, as well as the proposed metrics for quantifying the impact from physical, operational, environmental, social, and economic perspectives. This framework also provides a robust foundation for extending the analysis to adaptation options and for testing their associated costs and benefits. 

A publication exploring this work is being prepared by DARe team members Dr Wei Bi, Dr David Alvarez Castro, Dr Alistair Ford, Dr Yimeng Liu, Dr Abdullah Kahraman, Prof Kristen MacAskill, and Prof Roberto Palacin, and will be available soon.