Resilience Indicators for a Road Transport Network to Access Emergency Health Services

Abstract

The resilience concept, born for ecological systems, has been successfully adapted to other domains. Considering the case of transport networks, the evaluation of resilience is crucial to ensure their functionality. The objective of this paper is to provide a set of indicators that can be used to quantify the resilience of a transport network with particular attention to the access to emergency health services. The methodology adopted allows for obtaining some centrality measures and some metrics on network efficiency, to identify the most critical nodes and arcs in the network, and to determine how the removal of nodes/arcs affects efficiency. In this study, the resilience indicators of the road network of Messina, a city located in the northeastern tip of Sicily (Italy), are analyzed. The analysis focuses on three main emergency hospital facilities and, by examining the connectivity of the road network, the accessibility to these critical centers in different scenarios will be assessed. A relevant aspect of the proposed methodology is the exclusive use of open data in road network definition, which makes the procedure easily transferable to other areas. The results of the proposed application provide useful indications for improving road infrastructure and urban planning, as well as replicating the methodology in other geographical areas.