A Spatial-Temporal Community Vulnerability Assessment Framework Based on Human Mobility Trajectory Simulation

Extreme events have become more frequent, severe, and widespread in recent years. Typically, human suffering and financial loss in a disaster are unevenly distributed among different communities due to their social vulnerability levels, which weaken the capacity to respond to and recover from disasters. Therefore, understanding social vulnerability distribution is crucial to explain how communities experience the same hazard event differently and support community resilience management. However, current assessment methods (e.g., CDC/ATSDR SVI) often regard social vulnerability as a static concept and assume that residents do all activities within their home community, which is in contract with the fact that there are inter-communities interaction due to human mobility. To solve this problem, this paper proposed a framework integrating human vulnerability and mobility trajectories to create a spatial-temporal community social vulnerability assessment. Through the process, we will first use Markov Chain to simulate activity schedules of different vulnerability groups defined by the CDC. Then, we will track the location-based mobility of people with positioning data collected from mobile devices. After that, a connection between vulnerability-based activity schedules and location-based mobility trajectories will be established to integrate humans, activity, and location together for generating vulnerable people distribution. Finally, we will evaluate the community vulnerability level with the new vulnerable people distribution among different communities to get the spatial-temporal vulnerability assessment result. This can help improve the community’s resilience against hazardous events by making in-time response strategies for different vulnerable people. Besides that, this can also benefit daily energy planning with minimum economic and safety risks to improve the community’s resilience.