Comprehensive Evaluation of Emergency Shelters in Wuhan City Based on GIS

TL;DR

This study evaluates Wuhan's emergency shelters using GIS-based spatial analysis, AHP, and TOPSIS to assess their suitability, capacity, and areas for improvement, providing insights for urban emergency management enhancement.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive GIS-based framework combining AHP and TOPSIS for evaluating emergency shelter suitability and capacity in Wuhan.

Findings

96% of shelters are medium level or above in overall assessment.

Hongshan District has the strongest shelter capacity.

Jianghan District has the weakest shelter capacity.

Abstract

Emergency shelters, which reflect the city's ability to respond to and deal with major public emergencies to a certain extent, are essential to a modern urban emergency management system. This paper is based on spatial analysis methods, using Analytic Hierarchy Process to analyze the suitability of the 28 emergency shelters in Wuhan City. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution is further used to evaluate the accommodation capacity of emergency shelters in central urban areas, which provides a reference for the optimization of existing shelters and the site selection of new shelters, and provides a basis for improving the service capacity of shelters. The results show that the overall situation of emergency shelters in Wuhan is good, with 96\% of the places reaching the medium level or above, but the suitability level needs to be further improved, especially the effectiveness and accessibility. Among the seven central urban areas in Wuhan, Hongshan District has the strongest accommodation capacity while Jianghan District has the weakest, with noticeable differences.