Prioritization Framework for Rockfall Countermeasures for Rock-Cut Slopes for Rural Roads
Publication: Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 147, Issue 10
Abstract
Rockfalls can have devastating consequences to motorists and road facilities. Over time, countermeasures have been considered technically viable to mitigate these events. Rockfall hazard assessment is one of the options to identify feasible countermeasures, including designs, based on engineering-related data analysis. Of the attempts to enhance the fundamentals and practices of efficient and reliable rockfall hazard assessment, a few of the past contributions were devoted to developing holistic approaches that can identify the best design option by prioritizing technically viable countermeasures. These measures are based on multidimensional aspects such as construction cost and time, complexity, safety, and aesthetics. This paper presents a novel holistic prioritization framework to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of feasible design options for rockfall countermeasures, focusing on rural local road rockfall applications. The framework is composed of three main steps, including rockfall hazard assessment, prioritization, and sensitivity analysis. The processes of the proposed framework are well-demonstrated in this paper through an actual case study in West Virginia. The unique feature of the framework lies in a sensitivity analysis that provides decision-makers with a statistical inference of the confidence level in choosing the top-ranked design option. This paper also presents a synthesis of the evaluation criteria necessary to prioritize the countermeasure design options identified through a rockfall hazard assessment. Herein, the applicability of the sensitivity analysis approach was further expanded to quantitative measures obtained through standard scaling techniques.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Available data sets include (1) raw data collected for the evaluation criteria and AHP and (2) all data sets used to generate the tables and figures in the paper.
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Published In
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 147 • Issue 10 • October 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 30, 2020
Accepted: Apr 27, 2021
Published online: Jul 20, 2021
Published in print: Oct 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Dec 20, 2021
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