Assessing the importance of transportation facilities is an increasingly growing topic of interest to federal and state transportation agencies. This work proposes an optimization based model that uses concepts and techniques of complex networks science to assess the importance of transportation facilities.

The criticality is addressed using an economic quantitative measure – the impact on total travel time by examining the negative effect on travel time if the facility is destroyed or disrupted accounting for changes in user decisions consequent to the disruption. We developed an application using TransCAD’s GISDK language and we present the results in a built-up network to assess the criticality of the major infrastructures that are used to access Manhattan in an AM peak hour.