Modeling and Geo-Visualizing the Role of Infrastructure in Community Disaster Resilience

Understanding and improving the resilience of infrastructure is critical to the broader goal of community disaster resilience - minimization of loss and facilitation of recovery. Empirical research shows that infrastructure damage or disruption from hazard events and ensuing reduced service levels has a strong, negative impact on business and household performance. Conceptual and computer models relating the socio-technical facets of infrastructure to community disaster resilience are underdeveloped. Community disaster resilience does not make theoretical or practical sense without viewing infrastructure as the combination of capitals and services. Specifically, infrastructure is characterized by its relationship to other infrastructure, agents, possible disruptions, possible interventions, jurisdictions and markets. This paper presents a subset of evolving conceptual, algorithmic and geo-visual representations of infrastructure-dependent community disaster resilience. This builds upon existing work on ResilUS - a prototype simulation model of community disaster resilience - and other contributions from the literature. The ultimate goal of this research is to provide the means for making lifeline infrastructure mitigation planning and restoration decisions that account for socio-technical and recovery-based goals.