Review of Resilience Evaluation Methods in Operational Highway Tunnel

Abstract

The research on tunnel resilience has garnered increasing attention in recent years. Owing to prolonged exposure to natural or anthropogenic factors, the resilience level of many highway tunnels is continuously declining, rendering them susceptible to sudden accidents and challenging to restore postincident. Currently, although several scholars have employed diverse evaluation methods in their research on tunnel resilience, there is a lack of summarization and integration of these methods. In addition, there is also a dearth of a unified evaluation index system and framework for different types of natural or man-made disasters, which are crucial for advancing the development of tunnel resilience evaluation. This study commences with an introduction to the origin of resilience and the definition of tunnel resilience, and comprehensively summarizes commonly employed evaluation methods. Subsequently, this study centers on the resilience evaluation methods in tunnel engineering and analyzes their strengths and weaknesses. Besides, the distribution of resilience metrics in current researches is analyzed and the detailed explanations for the diverse choices are provided. According to the results and deficiencies of existing research, combined with the author’s perspectives, the index systems, evaluation frameworks, and resilience improvement strategies are proposed, which can be applied to the resilience evaluation of various operational highway tunnels under diverse disaster scenarios. Furthermore, this study also presents a case study on the evaluation of tunnel fire resilience to validate the applicability of the research findings. These findings aim to provide a guide for the operation and maintenance management of the operating tunnels and improve the scientific decision-making level of tunnel maintenance.