Rescue and safety system development and performance evaluation by network reliability

During the disaster, a rescue and safety system (RSS) must be developed to evaluate whether distributing rescue time or increasing the number of ambulances can successfully transport casualties. The rescue routes for ambulance transport can be represented as a network with arcs denoting the rescue roads and nodes denoting the location of casualties and casualty collection points (CCP). The uncertain damage on rescue roads causes the RSS hard to evaluate the rescue efficiency. Therefore, the transport time of ambulance is considered stochastic and thus such rescue network can be modeled as a stochastic rescue network (SRN). Network reliability of an SRN is defined as the probability that the number of casualties can be successfully transported from the affected area to CCP in a rescue time. An SRN model is constructed according to the road information under earthquake, and then a time probability table is established by the rescue road vehicle density to represent the traffic. A practical case in Taiwan is demonstrated to show the applicability of proposed network reliability evaluation. According to the information obtained from the proposed algorithm, the RSS can be further developed into a smartphone application to provide the commander with several suggestions of rescue operations.