Decreasing the Economic Vulnerability of the Built Environment throughout the Disaster Recovery Processes: An Agent Based Model Framework

The recurrent disastrous events impact a broad spectrum of stakeholders. Accordingly, decision-makers need to decrease the vulnerability of the built environment to future hazards to achieve long-term sustainability for the future generations. This paper discusses a decision-making framework via an agent-based model that assimilates the different participating entities in the recovery processes, while decreasing the economic vulnerability of the built environment. The developed model accounts for the objectives of the government agencies, and the needs of the residential and economic sectors in repairing their households and regaining the monthly revenue. The developed model utilizes a learning module that depicts the learning behavior of the stakeholders. In addition, the model utilizes a well-established economic vulnerability indicator that evaluates the susceptibility of the community to economic losses. Through integrating the economic vulnerability indicator into the associated stakeholder’s objective function, effective strategies for post-disaster recovery were identified. The model was tested on the post-Katrina recovery in the three coastal counties of Mississippi. The model was able to provide better recovery, and lower economic vulnerability values in comparison to the existing conditions in the three counties. As such, the proposed decision-making framework can be utilized by the recovery and planning agencies to balance between the short-term redevelopment objectives, and the long-term goals in decreasing the built environment vulnerabilities. Such innovative decision-making framework will be implemented on other case studies to furtherly validate the results of the model.