Resilience assessment and enhancement of interdependent transportation-healthcare system: A spatial accessibility approach

Aiming to obtain a parallel recovery strategy for the interdependent transportation-healthcare system (ITHS) after the earthquake, this study proposes a framework for the resilience assessment and enhancement of ITHS integrating functionality loss (FL), total recovery time (TRT) and resilience (R). A novel metric from the spatial accessibility measurement can effectively quantify the interdependence during the restoration process considering the travel delay and medical service reduction. The Simulated Annealing algorithm is utilized to efficiently search for an optimal parallel restoration strategy under limited resources. Various uncertainties associated with seismic damages, functional loss and restoration time of each component in the ITHS are considered and explicitly modelled. An application case in a real city is used to demonstrate the identification of the resilience-based optimal recovery strategy when the components in the ITHS exhibit disturbances. The optimal restoration strategy considering interdependence during recovery can enhance the resilience of the ITHS compared to ignoring recovery coupling. This method can support decision-makers with post-disaster reconstruction and hence significantly enhance the resilience of the ITHS.