Hospital's vulnerability assessment

Abstract

As many public institutions, hospitals are open spaces. Patients, staffs, visitors…, can access a lot of care units without control and can be in contact with many people. The most crowded places are often the most vulnerable areas where terrorist attacks can be the most damageable. This paper proposes an approach to evaluate the most crowded places in order to implement countermeasures against terrorist attacks. Firstly, a static model is constructed using the IDEF0 method in order to identify the different units of a hospital with their processes, and the accesses between units. Secondly by extracting the units and the accesses between the units, a flow model is specified to calculate the traffic in the hospital per hour. A linear program allows us to implement our dynamic model and to evaluate the most crowded areas. This communication relates one of the first results of the CIPS European Project called “THREATS”. This project aims to increase the resilience of EU hospitals as a critical infrastructure, by improving their protection capability and security awareness against terrorist attacks.