Quantifying the Resilience of Emergency Response Networks to Infrastructure Interruptions through an Enhanced Metanetwork-Based Framework

Abstract

Building effective and resilient emergency response networks (ERNs) is essential for the rapid recovery of interrupted infrastructure during extreme events. Aiming at providing critical benchmarking and implementable strategies for improving ERN resilience, this study proposed a novel framework to systematically quantify ERN resilience through an enhanced metanetwork analysis (MNA)–based approach. This framework first applied the MNA approach to conceptualize the complex emergency response as three-stage “agent-task-resource-knowledge” (A-T-R-K) metanetworks, representing connections among stakeholders, response tasks, emergency resources, and professional knowledge. Then, suitable metanetwork measures (i.e., natural connectivity, average speed, overall task completion, and the integrative metric of task resource and knowledge needs and task resource and knowledge waste) generated accordingly were used to quantify ERN resilience capacities—robustness, rapidity, resourcefulness, and redundancy. This proposed framework was validated through a case study of the emergency response to the Manchester Arena attack in the United Kingdom. The dynamic change of ERN resilience over time as well as possible causes within the case scenario were analyzed. Additionally, resilience improvement strategies and the advantages of the MNA approach are discussed. Overall, this enhanced MNA-based framework promotes an understanding of emergency response performance through systematically conceptualizing the complex ERN structure and dynamically quantifying ERN resilience capacities. Lessons learned from historical disasters provide decision-makers with implementable support to advance their collaboration and knowledge sharing and optimize resources and tasks for enhancing resilience in future infrastructure operation and emergency response activities.