Research question
How do network disruptions change access to jobs, healthcare, and essential services, and which communities may lose accessibility first under stress?
Independent build · mobility resilience · accessibility
A prototype digital twin for Atlanta road-network disruption.
When part of a road network fails — through flooding, crashes, or closures — the burden does not fall evenly across a city. This project builds a prototype road-network model of Atlanta that tests disruption scenarios and compares travel-time and accessibility outcomes, keeping model scope and assumptions transparent.
Data and methods
The road network is built from OpenStreetMap data using OSMnx and represented as a graph in NetworkX, with spatial layers processed in GeoPandas. Disruption scenarios remove or degrade selected network links, and the model compares shortest-path travel times across origin–destination pairs before and after each disruption. Accessibility comparisons are currently based on changes in origin–destination travel times; cumulative-opportunity measures for jobs and essential services are the planned next layer.
Prototype logic
The baseline model compares origin-destination travel-time and accessibility outcomes under road-network disruption scenarios. The first version is intentionally treated as a baseline rather than a final claim about Atlanta resilience.
Next steps
Larger-area stress tests, tighter accessibility thresholds, more meaningful service destinations, visualized closure locations, and neighborhood-level equity and vulnerability layers.
Operational relevance
The same question a city asks about a failed road link — who is affected, how badly, and for how long — is the question any network-based operation asks when part of it goes down. The model is built around disruption response: establish a baseline, remove capacity, and measure what changes and for whom. That framing transfers directly to operational settings where a delay, closure, or outage propagates unevenly through a system.
Why it matters
Resilience studies often focus on how quickly infrastructure recovers, while a more immediate question receives less attention: who loses access to jobs, healthcare, and essential services when a link fails, and for how long. A transparent, extensible network model closes part of that gap — it makes disruption scenarios testable at the neighborhood level and grounds planning conversations about resilience and equity in concrete, comparable outcomes.