On-Demand Mobility Services for Infrastructure and Community Resilience: A Review toward Synergistic Disaster Response Systems

TL;DR

This review explores how mobility-on-demand services can enhance urban resilience and disaster response by supporting various emergency functions and infrastructure recovery, emphasizing recent technological and strategic advancements.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent developments in using MOD services for disaster resilience, highlighting new applications, evaluation methods, and integration strategies.

Findings

MOD services support evacuation, rescue, and supply delivery

Technologies and business models enable synergistic disaster response

Assessment frameworks help evaluate multi-purpose system designs

Abstract

Mobility-on-demand (MOD) services have the potential to significantly improve the adaptiveness and recovery of urban systems, in the wake of disruptive events. But there lacks a comprehensive review on using MOD services for such purposes in addition to serving regular travel demand. This paper presents a review that suggests a noticeable increase within recent years on this topic across four main areas: resilient MOD services, novel usage of MOD services for improving infrastructure and community resilience, empirical impact evaluation, and enabling and augmenting technologies. The review shows that MOD services have been utilized to support anomaly detection, essential supply delivery, evacuation and rescue, on-site medical care, power grid stabilization, transit service substitution during downtime, and infrastructure and equipment repair. Such a versatility suggests a comprehensive assessment framework and modeling methodologies for evaluating system design alternatives that simultaneously serve different purposes. The review also reveals that integrating suitable technologies, business models, and long-term planning efforts offers significant synergistic benefits.