Seismic resilience optimization of urban transportation network during emergency medical response: A case study in Tehran metropolis

• Published in: Numerical Methods in Civil Engineering Vol. 9; no. 3; pp. 47 - 62
• Main Authors: Yaser Hosseini, Reza Karami Mohammadi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: K. N. Toosi University of Technology 01.03.2025
• Subjects: debris evacuation; emergency response; road blockage; seismic resilience; transportation network recovery
• ISSN: 2345-4296; 2783-3941
• DOI: 10.61186/NMCE.2409.1075

Urban pathways play a critical role in the functionality and safety of cities, especially during and after seismic events. Earthquakes, by their very nature, pose significant risks to urban infrastructure, often resulting in the collapse of buildings and the subsequent blockage of roads and pathways. The resilience of these urban pathways is crucial for ensuring that emergency services can reach affected areas, that evacuation routes remain open, and that the city can recover quickly from the disaster. This paper explores the seismic resilience of urban pathways, focusing on the challenges posed by building debris and the strategies needed to mitigate these risks. Understanding and enhancing the resilience of these pathways is crucial to decreasing earthquake impact on populations and infrastructure. In network restoration planning, various uncertainties have been accounted by probabilistic models to calculate the mean of pathways recovery time. To evaluate network performance after an earthquake, a network functionality index has been suggested. A Simulated Annealing-based framework is developed to maximize resilience. The optimization algorithm gives the maximum amount of needed resources and the optimal order of network recovery. The suggested approach is applied in Region 2 of the Tehran metropolitan area. According to the optimization results, the 10 resources can unblock the transportation network in predefined goal times. Also, the findings show that as the amount of resources increases, the influence of resources on decreasing network completion time diminishes.