Enforced Emergency Collaboration Strategy for Improving Robustness of Emergency Response Networks During Urban Floods

ABSTRACT Maintaining the robustness of emergency response networks (ERNs) between diverse stakeholders is critical to ensure effective emergency response during urban floods. However, most of the previous studies on ERNs have mainly concentrated on either the robustness evaluation of ideal ERNs in emergency plans prior to disasters or the modelling of actual ERNs during disasters. Less attention has been paid to improving robustness of actual ERNs during disasters. To overcome the robustness reduction of actual ERNs caused by the malfunction of stakeholders during urban floods, an enforced emergency collaboration strategy is proposed and validated in case study of ERNs during the 7·20 flood in Zhengzhou, Henan province of China. The robustness of the ERNs with different application time of the proposed strategy is investigated to verify the proposed strategy. Moreover, taking the ideal ERN in the urban flood emergency plan of Zhengzhou, Henan province of China as the blueprint, the proposed strategy is further validated by stochastic evolutionary simulation. The results show that the proposed strategy can effectively enhance robustness of ERNs. This study is helpful for achieving more effective and efficient emergency responses during urban floods.