Socio-Physical Framework for Estimating Resilience of Hospital Networks Following Scenario Earthquake Events

Modern communities became dependent on infrastructure, which have proven to be more vulnerable to natural and man-made hazards. As such assessing and designing infrastructure to be resilient is critical to ensure rapid recovery of the infrastructure and the community as a whole following major disasters. Estimating post-disaster recovery requires proper flow and interaction of information between interdependent physical, economic and social components of the involved sectors. Understanding this recovery process is essential, particularly for critical infrastructure, such as healthcare systems, which is vital for a community's well-being. This study introduces a new and comprehensive framework for estimating functionality recovery and resilience of a cluster of healthcare system in a community following earthquake occurrence. The framework accounts for both quantity and quality components of the offered hospitalization service, fluctuation in daily patient demand on each healthcare facility, the interdependence between healthcare facilities as well as interaction with other community infrastructure. Stochastic modeling and dynamic optimization tools are utilized to account for limited repair resources, repair sequences and change in demand over time. The presented approach is applied to Shelby County, Memphis, TN, to highlight the capabilities of the proposed framework and the impact of decision making on the recovery trajectory. This study highlights the necessity of considering the influence of other lifelines on the availability of hospitalization services. It is also shown that proper allocation and distribution of repair resources are key to achieving the desired level of functionality for the hospitals.