Towards a Common Taxonomy for Risk and Resilience Assessment in Road Transport Networks: A Conceptual Multidisciplinary Framework from the DATAGRAM Project

Abstract

The assessment of risk and resilience in road transport networks has been pursued independently by structural and transportation engineers, each community developing its own definitions, methods, and indicators. Despite addressing the same physical system, the two disciplines lack a shared conceptual framework, which limits the development of integrated assessment tools. This paper addresses this gap, focusing on seismic risk as a paradigmatic case of the broader multi-hazard problem. Drawing on the DATAGRAM project—a multidisciplinary initiative involving four Italian universities—the study compares definitions and operationalisations across four dimensions: object and scale of analysis, performance metric, treatment of probability, and reference time scale. For eight of the ten constructs examined (vulnerability, exposure, risk, robustness, redundancy, adaptability, recoverability, and resilience), conceptual convergence supports harmonised working definitions; for the remaining two (hazard and fragility), specific to structural engineering, no common definition is proposed, and this asymmetry is itself reported as a finding. A simplified worked example illustrates the structural-to-transport link, connecting a bridge fragility to a link-closure probability and translating it into a network-level travel-time increase and an intervention-priority ranking. The proposed mapping is intended as a conceptual basis towards integrated resilience assessment; the proposed taxonomy is a theoretically grounded conceptual synthesis that still requires external, independent validation.