Adapting analysis workflows to humanitarian needs: different road network models and tools

Urban planners and decision-makers need to provide, with increasing frequency, a rapid response to the many natural hazards looming over cities today, while relying on limited information and computational resources. This research explores viable ways to support them in developing performance-driven proposals via urban mod- elling by: (i) exploring potential synergies between configurational analysis methods, open computing plat- forms and collaborative geo-data; (ii) testing the inter- changeability of different road network models in a set of suitable case studies. Getting fast, free and ubiquitous access to updated spatial information should allow decision-makers and experts to gauge relevant centrality and resilience properties of urban grids and bears opportunities for quantitative scenario testing beyond institutional boundaries. Therefore, this paper suggests linking knowledge and metrics from different street network analysis models and adapting analysis workflows to humanitarian needs to foster deliberation in strategic decision-making and tactical planning in urban disaster contexts. The results obtained in a set of suitable case studies indicate that, under certain conditions, time and computational resources can be saved, and interdisci- plinarity boosted, by suitably interchanging primal and dual analysis models and tools. Nonetheless, further tests are needed to establish thresholds and generalize results.