Cascading failures and resilience optimization of hospital infrastructure systems against the COVID-19

The outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has put the resilience of a country’s healthcare infrastructure to the most severe test. The challenge of taking emergency measures to optimize the supply of medical resources and effectively meet the medical needs of residents is an important issue that needs to be resolved urgently in the prevention and control of public health emergencies. This paper analyzes cascading failures and optimization of the resilience of the hospital infrastructure system (HIS) with the presence of the COVID-19. It proposes a propagation model to describe the COVID-19 infectious process and establishes a cascading failure model of a HIS to analyze its failure mechanism. It also proposes a method for optimizing the resilience of HIS. Then the supplies and demands in maintaining the operations of HIS are studied, and a restoration strategy is obtained. Finally, simulation analysis of the spread of the COVID-19 is carried out to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method.