This study presents a method to analyze the most critical elements of the public road
system concerning outer effects which hinder the normal operation of the whole system.
The surveyed public road network in Budapest, Hungary is studied as a graph: Dijkstra’s
algorithm is applied to find the shortest path, and the Boykov-Kolmogorov method is
used to calculate the maximum flow of the network. Those elements are identified whose
damage can critically influence the operation of the network, and where the infrastructure
available for rescue teams has a bottleneck. Finally, the Wilcoxon post hoc test was
applied with Bonferroni correction. The tests have proven that the new method can
successfully identify the critical vulnerabilities of the network to determine its
weak points by considering reduced road capacities and the increased needs for transportation
arising due to a disaster. This pilot study confirmed that after the elimination of
the problems in statistical methods, the new framework can robustly identify those
road network elements whose development is of key importance from a disaster management
perspective.
