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Earthquake hazards may cause a significant loss to urban hospital network system (UHNS), including hospitals and medical transportation networks. As such, systematic seismic resilience assessment of such systems is of paramount importance to reduce loss and optimize casualty care during earthquakes. For that purpose, this paper proposes a novel method for assessing the seismic resilience of UHNS that considers the logical dependencies or coupling among the system's components, such as the casualty sources, the hospitals and the medical transportation networks. A resilience index is defined as the ratio between the average "shortest" time for a casualty to receive medical treatment before and after an earthquake. The time consists of both transportation time to a hospital and queuing time at the hospital. To obtain the shortest time, a real-time simulation model is proposed that considers the casualty sources, the changes in road traffic, the updates of Origin-Destination (OD) matrix for transportation time, the modifications of waiting time in hospital, the path reselection by casualty, and the changes in functionalities of bridges, hospitals and roads. The functionalities are obtained by analyzing fragility models, calculating residual functionality and estimating functionality recovery times. To calculate the fragilities of bridges and hospitals, a refined nonlinear finite element (FE) analysis is performed based on a general FE software, OpenSees, and the damages are obtained for various structural and nonstructural components, e.g. column, stairs and CT scanner of hospitals, as well as piers, bearings and abutments of bridges. The proposed method is demonstrated in a seismic resilience assessment of a realistic UHNS in Xiamen city of China and provides valuable references to assessments of seismic resilience of UHNS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building energy consumption is increasingly becoming a matter of global concern. A key aspect of this is the nature of building cold source systems and their effectiveness. However, choosing the cold source for a building is a complex decision-making process. The traditional evaluation method is relatively simple, and it is difficult to comprehensively consider multiple factors and their mutual influences, and it is even more difficult to increase the consideration of the whole life-cycle cost on this basis. Especially in China, the cost of extra-large public projects invested and constructed by the government plays a significant role in the decision-making process, and it should not be affected by other factors to change the decision-making. Therefore, this paper proposes a new decision-making system, which is based on value engineering (VE) and combined with analytic network process (ANP) to conduct a comprehensive study of project decision-making. Based on existing approaches to construction project evaluation and the selection of cold source systems, we establish an evaluation index for building cold source system functional models and network structures. This approach can take into account the impact of cost on decisions. We then present the results of a simulation-based case study of potential central air-conditioning cold source system solutions for the new Xiang'an New Airport in Xiamen, China. The corresponding value coefficients for conventional electric refrigeration, ice storage, and water storage were found to be 0.8262, 1.0049, and 1.2442, respectively. This suggests that water storage-based cooling offers the best technical and economic benefits for this project. It also confirms that the proposed decision support system can identify the modes with the highest value coefficients, which is one of the most effective methods for selecting a building cold source system scheme. Therefore, the system has the potential to support the effective selection of other building cold source schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City sustainability evaluation has a positive effect on guiding urban economy toward efficiency, stability and innovation with minimal resource consumption. This paper evaluated the sustainability level of Urban Agglomeration on the West Side of the Straits (WSS) in China from three dimensions: economy, society, and environment. We proposed a weighting method based on the hybrid GRA (HGRW) to calculate indicator weights, which considers the interaction between indicators through the similarity of curves, especially the annual increment curves. Evaluation results showed the sustainability level of WSS was not high with regional polarization and imbalance. Five core cities ranked in the top five, of which Xiamen performed best with an evaluation value over 0.65. The development of three sustainability dimensions was uncoordinated. Most cities were in the status of near coordination or primary coordination. The factors that drive and hinder city sustainability were related to economic and social aspects, such as investment in fixed assets, worker's wages, and education investment. Based on these findings, we made targeted suggestions for the local development planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]