Using Stochastic Models to Evaluate Puerto Rico's Transportation Infrastructure Flooding Preparedness

One of the seven issues listed in the freight assessment section of the 2050 Long Range Multimodal Transportation Plan (LRMTP, approved in 2023) encompasses the need for Puerto Rico’s ports and road freight transportation network (RFTN) to be less vulnerable to extreme weather events that affects the durability of the infrastructure and disrupts the movement of goods and services. Puerto Rico has an excellent geographic location for the transshipment of goods to other places in the Americas. Strategies to mitigate infrastructure damage to ports and roads resulting from overuse and to keep the system operating effectively will help Puerto Rico maintain its position as a global logistics hub. The development of an adaptable highway transport system is crucial, as railroads are not well-developed to undertake the freight transport needs, and the use of the marine-based freight M2 route connecting main and secondary ports is only emerging. 

The objective of this research project is to quantify and classify the impact of certain operational decisions made before and after flood-related weather events on four performance or optimization criteria: ports and RFTN infrastructure, traffic flows, safety, and flexibility to avoid delays and disruptions. The operational decisions to include are: increasing ports’ operating hours, locating regional hub-and-spoke points where freight coming from the ports is transferred from large trucks to smaller vehicles and routed to the distribution points, determining existing or to be developed alternative roads that reduce congestion at hotspots, and routing loads between ports. 

To accomplish the objective, TXST will develop a preliminary stochastic programming model to optimize a prototype of Puerto Rico’s RFTN, considering multiple flooding scenarios, forecasts of freight demand over 5 and 10 years, and the above mentioned operational decisions and optimization criteria. A variant of the developed model, which represents the current operations of ports and roads without incorporating any of the proposed operational decisions, will be used for comparison purposes. The main freight distribution points and associated demands to input into the models will be identified in cooperation with the listed project partner faculty at UPRM. Puerto Rico’s industry, government agencies, and consultants for these agencies will be sources to get the models’ input data, as well as information available online. If needed, the distribution points will be clustered. 

In this preliminary model, the unavailable data will be identified and estimated. The model will demonstrate to the Puerto Rico Department of Transportation and Public Works, the Puerto Rico Highway and Transportation Authority, and other relevant agencies a process they can apply for making informed decisions to enhance the durability and resilience of port and RFTN infrastructure under uncertainty caused by flooding and the relevance of collecting any highly relevant and missing data.