Resource Redistribution Method for Short-Term Recovery of Society After Large-Scale Disasters

Abstract

Recovery of society after a large-scale disaster generally consists of two phases, shortand long-term recoveries. The main goal of the short-term recovery is to bounce the damaged system back to the operating standards enabling residents in damaged cities to survive, and fast supply with vital resources to them is one of its important elements. We propose a general principle by which the required redistribution of vital resources between the affected and neighboring cities can be efficiently implemented. The shortterm recovery is a rescuer operation where uncertainty in evaluating the state of damaged region is highly probable. To allow for such an operation, the developed principle involves two basic components. The first one of ethic nature is the triage concept determining the current city priority in the resource delivery. The second one is the minimization of the delivery time subjected to this priority. Finally a certain plan of the resource redistribution is generated according to this principle. Several specific examples are studied numerically. It elucidates, in particular, the effects of system characteristics such as the city limit capacity in resource delivery, the type of initial resource allocation among the cities, the number of cities able to participate in the resource redistribution, and the damage level in the affected cities. As far as the uncertainty in evaluating the state of damaged region is concerned, some specific cases were studied. It assumes the initial communication system has crashed and formation of a new one and the resource redistribution proceed synchronously. The obtained results enable us to consider the resource redistribution plan governed by the proposed method semi-optimal and rather efficient especially under uncertainty.

Resource Redistribution under Lack of Information: Short-Term Recovery after Large Scale Disasters

“…It will be used in specifying the priority of the cities in the resource redistribution queue. As previously [7] to avoid the discussion about ethics or morality of the priority choice we appeal to the following historical example. Baron Dominique Jean Larrey, surgeon-in-chief to Napoleon's Imperial Guard, articulated one of the first triage rule in 1792: "Those who are dangerously wounded should receive the first attention, without regard to rank or distinction.…”

“…The further modification of these values will be explained below, see Eq. (7). In the developed algorithm the time moments {t arr } are specified via the expression…”

“…This procedure of the plan reconstruction with the information update is a main modification of the algorithm developed in our previous work [7]. It enables us to govern the resource redistribution efficiently even in the case of the lack of information.…”

“…This assumption was accepted to make the dynamics of supply as smooth as possible. It should be noted that in the previous paper [7] we analyzed the resource redistribution supposing that 15 quanta can be assembled simultaneously within 15 minutes. Given the other conditions equal, it leads actually to the same dynamics, where, however, the effects of discretization are much more pronounced.…”

“…In the previous work [7] we have proposed an algorithm by which the required resource redistribution can be implemented in a quasi-optimal way. Initially it was applied to modeling the resource redistribution in an affected system for which the whole information about the city states is available from the beginning of the short-term recovery.…”