A Novel Method for Seismic Resilience Assessment of Urban Hospital Network Systems Based on a Real-Time Simulation Model

Earthquake hazards may cause a significant loss to urban hospital network system (UHNS), including hospitals and medical transportation networks. As such, systematic seismic resilience assessment of such systems is of paramount importance to reduce loss and optimize casualty care during earthquakes. For that purpose, this paper proposes a novel method for assessing the seismic resilience of UHNS that considers the logical dependencies or coupling among the system’s components, such as the casualty sources, the hospitals and the medical transportation networks. A resilience index is defined as the ratio between the average “shortest” time for a casualty to receive medical treatment before and after an earthquake. The time consists of both transportation time to a hospital and queuing time at the hospital. To obtain the shortest time, a real-time simulation model is proposed that considers the casualty sources, the changes in road traffic, the updates of Origin-Destination (OD) matrix for transportation time, the modifications of waiting time in hospital, the path reselection by casualty, and the changes in functionalities of bridges, hospitals and roads. The functionalities are obtained by analyzing fragility models, calculating residual functionality and estimating functionality recovery times. To calculate the fragilities of bridges and hospitals, a refined nonlinear finite element (FE) analysis is performed based on a general FE software, OpenSees, and the damages are obtained for various structural and nonstructural components, e.g. column, stairs and CT scanner of hospitals, as well as piers, bearings and abutments of bridges. The proposed method is demonstrated in a seismic resilience assessment of a realistic UHNS in Xiamen city of China and provides valuable references to assessments of seismic resilience of UHNS.