Assessing the Dynamic Resilience of Urban Road System: A Case Study of Xiamen City, China

Abstract

Urban road system resilience is critical for managing extreme flood events, yet existing assessments predominantly focus on static indicators that capture inherent system capacity rather than dynamic responses to disturbances. This study proposes a dynamic resilience analysis framework that tracks urban road system performance under progressive flood intensities using three core indicators: road service availability (infrastructure condition), road network accessibility (user impact), and recovery speed (managerial effectiveness). Applied to Xiamen, a coastal city in China, the framework simulates four flood inundation scenarios (0.335, 1, 3, and 9 m) to monitor system-flood interactions and identify critical thresholds. Results reveal that structural damage does not necessarily imply functional disruption, and high road density provides service redundancy, maintaining user accessibility even when some roads are flooded. The analysis identifies a current resilience threshold at 1 m inundation, which can be elevated through infrastructure upgrades. These findings demonstrate that dynamic assessment complements static approaches by revealing critical flood thresholds and vulnerable zones to enable targeted interventions—from emergency response prioritization to long-term adaptation planning. The proposed framework offers a transferable methodology for coastal cities to diagnose their own resilience thresholds and guide evidence-based investments, with minimal data requirements making it applicable in data-scarce contexts.