Assessing a vulnerability index for healthcare service facilities: A logistics perspective

The rapid growth of cities in the 21st century along with the congestion of road infrastructure and high population density makes urban spaces highly vulnerable to disasters. After a disaster occurs, health services infrastructure is critical to support medical operations for injured patients. This chapter presents a methodology for evaluating the vulnerability of health services infrastructure from a logistics perspective, based on several layers of information such as population density, road congestion, and hospital location. The methodology uses computational and business intelligence techniques such as fuzzy inference systems, geographic information systems, graph theory, and visualization. The purpose of this methodology is to generate a unique score of vulnerability that identifies each health services facility, providing decision makers with the analytical framework of a spatial multicriteria analysis to evaluate their options for facing a disaster.