Development of a Spatial Decision Support System Tool for Identifying Strategic Roads

Any country's vital infrastructure, including transportation, plays a major role in a disaster situation. As transportation networks are threatened by different events such as natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes) and also man-made disasters (e.g., terrorism).Therefore, the identification, protection, stability, and development of transportation infrastructure is a vital issue during a disaster. In this paper, a spatial decision support tool, termed ISRT, is proposed. By using this tool, the road transportation network performance is evaluated based on four criteria, i.e., capacity of the roads, accessibility of the roads to military locations, vulnerability of the roads and the importance of the roads in the geometric structure of the network. By proposing the concept of strategic roads, the road networks, studied in this paper, are ranked. The tool is able to interact with decision-makers, receive their priorities and show the results on a map. The results indicate that eight percent of the roads under study are strategic.