Quantifying Functional Criticality of Lifelines Through Mobility-Derived Population-Facility Dependence for Human-Centered Resilience

TL;DR

This paper introduces a human-centered metric for infrastructure criticality based on mobility data, revealing disproportionate dependence on a small subset of facilities and highlighting increased future risk due to climate change.

Contribution

It develops a novel behavioral-based criticality measure integrating mobility patterns with hazard models, bridging engineering risk analysis and human mobility analysis.

Findings

Dependence is concentrated: 2.8% of grocery stores and 14.8% of hospitals are super-critical.

Future flood hazards increase population-weighted vulnerability by 67.6%.

Behavioral criticality amplifies risk assessment beyond physical asset analysis.

Abstract

Lifeline infrastructure underpins the continuity of daily life, yet conventional criticality assessments remain largely asset-centric, inferring importance from physical capacity or network topology rather than actual behavioral reliance. This disconnect frequently obscures the true societal cost of disruption, particularly in underserved communities where residents lack service alternatives. This study bridges the gap between engineering risk analysis and human mobility analysis by introducing functional criticality, a human-centered metric that quantifies the behavioral indispensability of specific facilities based on large-scale visitation patterns. Leveraging 1.02 million anonymized mobility records for Harris County, Texas, we operationalize lifeline criticality as a function of visitation intensity, catchment breadth, and origin-specific substitutability. Results reveal that dependence is highly concentrated: a small subset of super-critical facilities (2.8% of grocery stores and 14.8% of hospitals) supports a disproportionate share of routine access. By coupling these behavioral scores with probabilistic flood hazard models for 2020 and 2060, we demonstrate a pronounced risk-multiplier effect. While physical flood depths increase only moderately under future climate scenarios, the population-weighted vulnerability of access networks surges by 67.6%. This sharp divergence establishes that future hazards will disproportionately intersect with the specific nodes communities rely on most. The proposed framework advances resilience assessment by embedding human behavior directly into the definition of infrastructure importance, providing a scalable foundation for equitable, adaptive, and human-centered resilience planning.