Resilience modeling of traffic network in post-earthquake emergency medical response considering interactions between infrastructures, people, and hazard

Timely rescue of injured people by emergency medical services (EMS) is essential for disrupted traffic networks due to the failures of transportation infrastructure following major hazards. Rational resilience performance indicators in terms of EMS cannot only help implementing an optimized post-disaster medical response plan, but also identify the most cost-effective pre-disaster preventive measures. A framework to assess the resilience performance of a typical traffic network in terms of post-earthquake EMS is developed by considering the interactions between building infrastructures, injured people, vulnerable medical centers, EMS vehicles, disrupted traffic network, and natural hazards. Two resilience performance indicators are introduced characterizing the relative importance of different links and overall EMS resilience for the whole network. A virtual community is selected to demonstrate the proposed framework, which is followed by a parametric study of the earthquake magnitude, bridge types, location and number of medical centers, and optimal location for a new medical center.