A Social-Cost Framework for Prioritizing Infrastructure Restoration in Post-Disaster Transportation Networks

Disruptions to transportation networks critically affect humanitarian response by delaying access to essential goods and exacerbating human suffering. This study proposes a welfare-based framework for assessing transportation network vulnerability, defined as the marginal increase in social cost resulting from infrastructure disruptions. Social cost comprises congestion-related logistics costs and deprivation costs, the latter reflecting welfare losses from delayed access to critical supplies. The framework integrates deprivation valuation within a user-equilibrium assignment, allowing vulnerability to emerge endogenously from demand levels, congestion, capacity constraints, and rerouting behavior. Numerical experiments on a benchmark network show that vulnerability rankings are highly sensitive to these factors, with critical links shifting as demand increases and network conditions evolve. In particular, links identified as critical under fixed-cost or logistics-cost-only approaches may lose significance when equilibrium effects and deprivation costs are considered, while others become dominant once demand thresholds induce structural changes in effective access. A sequential restoration analysis shows that prioritizing interventions using the proposed framework reduces cumulative welfare losses relative to fixed-cost strategies. An empirical application to the Colombian Coffee Zone road network further demonstrates the framework’s practical applicability. The findings highlight that vulnerability in humanitarian logistics is dynamic and demand-dependent, providing a more operational basis for infrastructure restoration planning following disasters.