A Spatiotemporal Framework for the Resilience of a Post-Disaster Waste Management System

A natural disaster often generates large quantities of debris and waste, which challenges local waste management systems. Therefore, it is important to effectively prioritize affected areas for debris collection, mobilize limited resources, and manage local waste management systems based on resilience. The impact of disaster debris spatially varies depending on how it is distributed and processed, and thus resilience after the impact should be defined with a spatial dimension. However, current resilience metrics, which are related to a temporal view of system performance, do not sufficiently capture differential impacts across affected geographic locations over time. This study proposes a spatiotemporal framework for improving resilience of a post-disaster waste management system where resilience is measured using three dimensions: performance, road segments, and time. It is important to note that disaster waste logistics resources are arranged with respect to roads (e.g., by sending hauling trucks along a road to collect the surrounding debris). As such, two-dimensional spatial information (i.e., x- and y-coordinates) is reduced to one-dimensional information (i.e., a series of road segments). The framework will enable decision makers to compare the resilience of different roads and arrange resources for disaster debris management in a more systematic manner.