Suitable Base Station Selection for Post Disaster Quick Road Network Recovery in a Vulnerable Urban Area

Road network is a key element of a society and its recovery becomes the most important task after any severe natural disaster. Road network recovery (RNR) becomes the top priority to reach isolated areas for rescue and/or rehabilitation. Recently, task scheduling of RNR (SRNR) is emerged as a challenging optimization task in computational intelligence domain. The exiting methods work well on planned road network environment with established base stations. On the other hand, there are many areas across the globe (especially, the old city parts in megacities), which are vulnerable as well as congested with no base station nearby. The probability of road network disintegration in those areas is high due to natural catastrophe. Therefore, base station establishment in such areas is an important issue and the optimal position selection is very important for better post disaster service. In this study, suitable base station position selection is investigated for post disaster quick RNR. Old Dhaka area in the megacity of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is chosen as a case study. Nodes are marked with resilience capacity and road network disintegration is considered probabilistically for different earthquake levels. Finally, optimal base station location is identified employing Ant Colony Optimization based SRNR values.