Interactive travel time scenario modeling tool to facilitate disaster response, demonstrated on the Idai disaster in Chimanimani

Abstract Disruption to critical infrastructure is of major interest to engineers, policy-makers and planners. A resilient transport system should be able to withstand the adverse impacts of undesirable weather conditions such as flooding, landslides etc and be able to function in such weather without posing further disaster to locals depending on such infrastructure for services. The focus of this paper is to study and model the loss of accessibility in terms of delay in travel time that was experienced during the Chimanimani Idai floods as a result of damage to the key bridges that linked the area. The model should be interactive in nature allowing the testing or modeling of different scenarios with different parameters and possibly be used by policy makers and site engineers during planning and disaster mitigation. In order to reduce or completely avoid the cascading effects of a disaster such as witnessed during Cyclone Idai in Chimanimani there is need to fully understand the behavior and dependency of transport infrastructure networks and possibly model methodologies and techniques which can be used to assess and weight different options targeted to reduce the impact of hazards.