A SIMPLIFIED APPROACH FOR THE SEISMIC ASSESSMENT OF HOSPITAL NETWORKS

Abstract eng:
Modern cities are complex organisms, very difficult to control and represent through comprehensive models. Their safety and their resilience cannot be tackled without a full comprehension of their systems, networks and infrastructures. Health care systems are one of the most crucial assets of complex communities. The network of Hospitals, indeed, is assumed to be effective and supportive in case of emergency, such as at the occurrence of strong earthquakes. In this work the reliability of a Hospital network is verified. The analysis is aimed at evaluating the relative efficiency of each Hospital Complex inside the network, taking into account its size, performance and accessibility. Interdependencies between the Hospitals and the transportation networks has been taken in account in the analysis. The research has been applied on a case-study, i.e. a real network of Hospital buildings, including 41 complexes. The effectiveness of each complex has been measured using a reduced number of meaningful parameters appositely selected. A further evaluation, concerning a simplified rating of the seismic vulnerability of the Hospital buildings have been made for all considered cases. Furthermore, the capacity of each Hospital complex has been evaluated in terms of extension of the reference area and amount of the covered population. Finally, the accessibility to each complex has been checked, by analyzing the mutual connectivity of the entire network using graph theory, which has been applied by considering the effective position of each Hospital complex inside the area, and the real connection infrastructure. As a result of the study, an effective description of the examined network has been achieved, and a simplified rating of each Hospital complex has been found.

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