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.