NIST-Funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning

What is the Challenge? The ability to model community disaster resilience comprehensively requires that experts from engineering and social science disciplines work to systematically model how physical, economic, and social infrastructure systems in communities interact and influence recovery efforts. There are currently no models that consider all aspects of how a natural disaster affects a community or that measure community resilience comprehensively and quantitatively. The Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning brings together experts from engineering, the social and behavioral sciences, and economics to model community resilience.

Project Purpose: This National Institute of Standards and Technology-funded project is composed of more than 100 individuals, including researchers, computer programmers, developers, NIST collaborators, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate and undergraduate students. Working in teams on more than 40 tasks, the Center of Excellence will provide a common data architecture by collaborating with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to ensure that data from around the world can be seamlessly integrated into a robust computational environment known as IN-CORE: The Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment. IN-CORE will allow users to optimize community disaster resilience planning and post-disaster recovery strategies using physics-based models of interdependent physical systems combined with socio-economic systems.

Outcomes: Technological, financial, social, political, healthcare, education, and public administration systems that are essential for recovery and the vitality of a community are being integrated into the model, creating a nexus between social and technological infrastructure networks that will narrow the gap between the engineering and social science aspects of resilience planning and that will facilitate risk communication among stakeholders and community resilience planners. The work products from the Center will provide a quantitative and science-based approach to community resilience assessment and, for the first time, will support a business case for enhancing disaster resilience at the community level. IN-CORE will be able to answer detailed questions on the lingering effects of natural disasters on communities related to issues such as population dislocation; health and the well-being of the residents; and business and fiscal impacts.

There are two different architectures of IN-CORE:

IN-CORE v1.0 is based on Ergo (previously referred to as MAEViz)—an open source multi-hazard assessment, response, and planning tool for performing risk-based community resilience planning.
IN-CORE v2.0 is currently under development. IN-CORE 2.0 will be a web-based application that brings the capabilities of the desktop client in the 1.0 version to the web while adding new capabilities such as a REST API, support for tools in additional languages such as Python, spatio-temporal data support, surface fragilities, communicating with external tools such as OpenSEES, and overlaying data from web sources such as OpenStreetMap, NBI, NOAA, etc.

Principal Investigators: John van de Lindt (jwv@engr.colostate.edu) and Bruce Ellingwood (Bruce.Ellingwood@colostate.edu), Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University

Project Website: http://resilience.colostate.edu