Interdependent Healthcare Critical Infrastructure Analysis in a Spatiotemporal Environment: A Case Study

Abstract

During an urban flooding scenario, Healthcare Critical Infrastructure (HCI) represents a critical and essential resource. As the flood levels rise and the existing HCI facilities struggle to keep up with the pace, the under-preparedness of most urban cities to address this challenge becomes evident. Due to the disruptions in the interdependent Critical Infrastructures (CI) network (i.e., water supply, communications, electricity, transportation, etc.), during an urban flooding event, the operations at the healthcare CI facilities are inevitably affected. Hence, there is a need to identify cascading CI failure scenarios to visualize the propagation of failure of one CI facility to another CI, which can impact vast geographical areas. The goal of this work is to develop an interdependent HCI simulation model in a spatiotemporal environment to understand the dynamics in real-time and model the propagation of cascading CI failures in an interdependent HCI network. The model is developed based on a real-world cascading CI failure case study on an interdependent HCI network during the flood disaster event in December 2015 at Chennai, TamilNadu, India. The interdependencies between the CI networks are modeled by using the Stochastic Colored Petri Net (SCPN) based modeling approach. SCPN is used to model a real-word process that occurs in parallel or concurrently. Furthermore, a geographic information system-based interface is integrated with the simulation model, to visualize the dynamic behavior of the interdependent HCI SCPN simulation model in a spatiotemporal environment. Such a dynamic simulation model can assist the decision-makers and emergency responders to rapidly simulate ‘what if’ kind of scenarios and consequently respond rapidly.