Resilience assessment of the interdependent transportation–healthcare system during emergency response

The emergency medical response after a strong earthquake relies on a robust transportation-healthcare system and effective management. This article proposes a resilience assessment framework for the interdependent transportation-healthcare system (ITHS) integrating physical loss and organisational management during post-earthquake emergency response. Considering the earthquake-induced injured people, the seismic damage to transportation, and the quantification of the condition of the patients after being treated, a novel metric is proposed to evaluate the response effort during the first 72 h. Bi-objective optimisation is developed to solve the real-time dispatching and treating problems instead of overwhelming one single hospital. In addition, the separate impact of disrupted transportation and damaged healthcare on the interdependent system is calculated to measure the cascading effect. It is shown that proper resource allocation and practical management are crucial to guarantee the desired level of the response effort.