Improving emergency response to cascading disasters: Applying case-based reasoning towards urban critical infrastructure

With the increase of the interconnections and interdependencies between urban critical infrastructures (UCIs), natural and anthropogenic triggers like typhoons, earthquakes, and fires are more likely to generate secondary emergencies and escalate into cascading disasters. However, most of the existing studies are focused on single disaster response, with limited capability to influence emergency management in complex events. This paper aims to fill this gap, analyzing the possible use of case-based reasoning (CBR) and the historical cases to increase the effectiveness of emergency decision-making in cascading disasters. We show that CBR can support the deployment of alternative emergency response tasks in the initial phase of response, helping to not only cope with the trigger disaster, but also anticipate and address the possible escalations of secondary disasters. In conclusion, the proposed method is validated through the description of a case study in China and the analysis indicates that the generated emergency response solutions can properly meet the practical requirements to deal with the complex disaster situation towards UCI, explaining its replicability and highlighting the open questions for future studies.