Modeling for large-scale disaster response simulations : a sociotechnical resilience approach

• Main Author: Tantri, Fredy
• Other Authors: Sulfikar Amir
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2020
• Subjects: Engineering::Systems engineering; Social sciences::Sociology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/144344
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Resilience is generally defined as the ability of a system to plan, prepare, absorb, respond to, and recover from disruptions, as well as to adapt to new conditions. Recently, the concept of resilience has been adopted into the study of sociotechnical systems to analyze resilient capacity of critical urban infrastructures such as power grid, water supply, healthcare, and telecommunication/cyber infrastructures. This research addresses the challenge in modeling sociotechnical resilience by taking into account the hybrid nature of sociotechnical systems. Therefore, this dissertation aims to advance a theoretical framework of sociotechnical resilience by developing a conceptual model and simulation, as well as applying the concept in a real-world urban setting. In order to achieve this goal, this research utilizes a computational modeling approach to observe the behavior of sociotechnical systems during a disruption and to measure its resilient performance. The conceptual model we developed uses the structure of multi-level directed acyclic graph and employs the operational resilience paradigm through the concept of functionality to capture the temporal dimension of system performance. To apply the concept of sociotechnical resilience, the healthcare system in Jakarta was used as the case study. Jakarta is the national capital and also the center of economic activities of Indonesia. It is a megacity with a very high population density. From the perspective of medical emergency, this condition renders the city vulnerable to a large-scale disaster. On top of the existing urban problems, the regulation and organization for disaster management are still relatively new. The coordination strategy they use is a centralized command center approach without supported by real-time information systems. Therefore, we proposed additional coordination strategies that are feasible to be applied in Jakarta, and then we evaluated the resilience performance of each strategy by simulating the response under a certain disaster event characterized by the number of victims and disaster locations. The computational model and simulation were developed based on regulations, disaster response guidelines, and empirical data from government. This dissertation highlights the importance of system flexibility to allow structural reconfiguration at the organizational level during a disruptions or disasters through planning or institutional policy design. To conclude, the main contribution of this dissertation is to lay a foundation in implementing the concept of sociotechnical resilience to enhance the system capacity of complex infrastructure through modeling and simulation.