RICRI Research Seminar: Resilience and Adaptation of Transportation under Climate Change

With climate change intensifying the frequency and severity of extreme events, transportation systems—critical to daily life—are increasingly exposed to floods, natural hazards, accidents, public health crises, and social security incidents. This study develops an integrated modelling and simulation framework to evaluate the structural and functional resilience of complex transportation systems under multiple disruptions. The framework combines (1) a traffic simulation model capturing heterogeneous demand and route choice, (2) a flood simulator based on future runoff scenarios from global climate models and the CaMa-Flood model, and (3) an impact analyser that overlays hazard scenarios on transport networks to quantify performance loss and resilience dynamics. Applications to the Chinese highway network, urban transportation systems in China, the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, and selected regions in the United States and Europe demonstrate its ability to assess vulnerability, test adaptation strategies, and inform infrastructure design and policy. This approach provides a transferable quantitative tool to reduce systemic risk and enhance resilience in complex transport networks.