Effective Criteria for Seismic Rehabilitation Planning of Road Transportation Infrastructures

While seismic rehabilitation process for road infrastructures has been traditionally based on seismic factors, consideration of non-seismic factors is necessary for reliable project ranking. Non-seismic factors include socioeconomic criteria, determining the value of a project to its users’ community. Based on the information obtained from a questionnaire survey and literature review, this paper identifies a set of effective rehabilitation criteria (RC) for seismic rehabilitation decision-making to develop a priority index that is applied to determine the rehabilitation priority. The identified RC will then be weighted for four types of road structures including bridges, tunnels, retaining walls, and buildings. The results can be generalized to provide valuable insights for policy makers concerned with transportation infrastructure planning, especially in developing countries where project prioritization is often an issue. To underline the value of the study, the weighted RC are applied in ranking road rehabilitation projects in an illustrative example.