Development and implementation of post-earthquake medical functionality assessment method for hospital campus considering buildings interdependencies in BIM

• Proposed a BIM-based method to assess post-earthquake medical functionality at hospital-campus scale. • Integrated multi-source component, patient-flow, and seismic-damage data in a unified BIM platform. • Modeled cross-building interdependencies and cascading effects via discrete event simulation under damage. • Automated BIM-to-DES mapping for refined, campus-wide post-earthquake functionality assessment. Hospitals are complex systems composed of multiple interconnected buildings, making post-earthquake functionality (PEF) assessment critical for emergency response. Most existing studies focus on single buildings, overlooking challenges at the campus level, including: managing diverse and interdependent data without a unified platform, capturing interdependencies among buildings and departments, and addressing cascading functional losses caused by damage to departments or components. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a Building Information Modeling (BIM)-based method that explicitly considers hospital-wide interdependencies to enable automated and refined PEF assessment. The framework comprises: (1) a BIM modeling approach integrating component information, patient flows, and seismic data; (2) a discrete event simulation (DES) method for inter-building functional interactions; and (3) a BIM-based PEF assessment approach considering component–department–building dependencies. A case study demonstrates that the method enables integrated data handling, quantifies PEF across buildings, and effectively evaluates cascading impacts, thereby supporting hospital emergency response and resilient hospital design.