Biomimetic method of emergency life channel urban planning in Wuhan using slime mold networks

Abstract

This study investigated a bio-inspired approach to planning optimal routes for urban hospital life channels to enable better responses to urban public security incidents. An experimental slime mold network and an origin–destination (OD) network model in which the nodes were tertiary hospitals in Wuhan were constructed. Correlation metrics of the two network models were used for network analysis and visualization. The experimental results showed that the slime mold network was better than the OD network in terms of global optimization. Furthermore, significant polarization of the influence value of urban hospital nodes resulted in a power-law distribution. This paper presents an urban planning method in which the biological mechanism of slime mold foraging is applied to construct shortest path networks in an emergency life channels. The results can be used to examine the relationship between urban roads and hospital nodes and the rational of global optimization distribution when planning the locations of new hospitals. A set of replicable and sustainable methods for conducting a biomimetic slime mold experiment to model real environments are presented. This approach provides a novel perspective for modeling emergency life channels.

Keywords

• Urban hospital life pathways
• Biomimetic slime mold experiment
• Network analysis
• Urban planning