Suggested Citation:
Seligson, Hope, Yuko Murachi, Yueyue Fan, Masanobu Shinozuka (2004) Acute Care Hospital Resource Allocation Problem Under Seismically Damaged Transportation Systems. 13th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering (1124)

This paper describes a methodology currently under development to optimize the post-earthquake routing of the injured to functioning hospitals. The methodology considers the geographic distribution of injuries of various severities, earthquake damage to hospitals and their functionality, and impacts on transportation networks. Past experience has shown too often that earthquake damage to highway components (e.g., bridges) can severely disrupt traffic flow, thus it is important to develop a methodology to model hospital resource allocation relative to the damaged transportation network. The basic problem can be formulated as a linear programming problem. The objective is to minimize the travel time or delay in transporting injured patients to the appropriate hospitals, subject to the status and capacities of the hospitals and the post-earthquake traffic condition. Individual scenario earthquakes are modeled, and the corresponding post-event damage state of the transportation network is evaluated using custom fragility functions for highway bridges integrated into a Monte Carlo simulation analysis. Travel time between the injury location and each hospital is obtained from the conventional user equilibrium model. The resulting methodology could be used to develop a real-time decision support tool for use in emergency response and preparedness planning, as well as for consideration in mitigation decisions regarding hospitals and transportation infrastructure. The methodology, once developed, will be pilot-tested in Orange County, California.

Key words: Emergency response, transportation network, travel time, decision support, routing optimization