Vulnerability importance measures toward resilience-based network design

Network resilience to a disruption is generally considered to be a function of the initial impact of the disruption (the network's vulnerability) and the trajectory of recovery after the disruption (the network's recoverability). In the context of network resilience, this work develops and compares several flow-based importance measures to prioritize network edges for the implementation of preparedness options. For a particular preparedness option and particular geographically located disruption, we compare the different importance measures in their resulting network vulnerability, as well as network resilience for a general recovery strategy. Results suggest that a weighted flow capacity rate, which accounts for both (i) the contribution of an edge to maximum network flow and (ii) the extent to which the edge is a bottleneck in the network, shows most promise across four instances of varying network sizes and densities.