Abstract
Emergency management services, such as firefighting, rescue teams and ambulances, are all heavily reliant on road networks. However, even for highly industrialised countries such as Germany, and even for large cities, spatial planning tools are lacking for road network interruptions of emergency services. Moreover, dependencies of emergency management expand not only on roads but on many other systemic interrelations, such as blockages of bridges. The first challenge this paper addresses is the development of a novel assessment that captures systemic interrelations of critical services and their dependencies explicitly designed to the needs of the emergency services. This aligns with a second challenge: capturing system nodes and areas around road networks and their geographical interrelation. System nodes, road links and city areas are integrated into a spatial grid of tessellated hexagons (also referred to as tiles) with geographical information systems. The hexagonal grid is designed to provide a simple map visualisation for emergency planners and fire brigades. Travel time planning is then optimised for accessing city areas in need by weighing impaired areas of past events based on operational incidents. The model is developed and tested with official incident data for the city of Cologne, Germany, and will help emergency managers to better device planning of resources based on this novel identification method of critical areas.
Highlights
The first challenge this paper addresses is the development of a novel assessment that captures systemic interrelations of critical services and their dependencies explicitly designed to the needs of the emergency services
Travel time planning is optimised for accessing city areas in need by weighing impaired areas of past events based on operational incidents
Emergency response services such as rescue services and fire brigades are classified as critical infrastructure (CI) by the German federal ministry of the interior [1].Between the years 2016 and 2017, it is estimated that the rescue services in Germany alone reacted to about 13.9 million incidents [2]
Summary
Emergency response services such as rescue services and fire brigades are classified as critical infrastructure (CI) by the German federal ministry of the interior [1].Between the years 2016 and 2017, it is estimated that the rescue services in Germany alone reacted to about 13.9 million incidents [2]. The model developed, calculates the impact that the blockage of specific road network areas has on the usual response times of rescue services to the rest of the urban study area. Within the KIRMin project, Cologne was chosen as a study area for various hazard scenarios, such as floods and earthquakes, and the identification of their impacts on several CI, including the road network. To riverine floods and for Cologne, the impacts and cascading risks to different CI, such as the emergency rescue services, the road network and hospitals are already demonstrated with GIS-based approaches [9,10,11]. Following the identified needs of emergency managers through the KIRMin project, the earthquake is a relevant hazardous scenario for criticality assessments of the road network for emergency services and timely emergency response provision
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