A Probabilistic Framework to Evaluate Seismic Resilience of Hospital Buildings Using Bayesian Networks

Hospitals are indispensable to urban system, especially when an earthquake occurs. Once damaged, it is difficult for hospitals to maintain the continuity of emergency care operations for earthquake victims and ensure the safety of inpatients. A hospital can be regarded as a complex engineering system, whose physical performance relies on numerous sub-systems and components. The purpose of this paper is to propose a comprehensive framework to evaluate the seismic resilience of hospital buildings, considering the interdependencies on nonstructural components. In this study, critical departments and rooms in the hospital are selected as functional units and the Bayesian network method is used to reveal the interdependencies between departments, rooms, and internal components for the calculation of availabilities of departments and rooms. An impact factor is proposed to quantify the amplification effects of one component on the other component, which provides an interface to input the results of a series of upcoming experiments on multiple components. A case study of a hypothetic hospital is presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework.