Developing measurement science for community resilience assessment

Community resilience depends on the performance of the built environment and on supporting social, economic and public institutions which are essential for the recovery of a community following a disaster. A community’s social needs and objectives (including post-disaster recovery) are not reflected in the codes, standards and other regulatory documents that traditionally have been applied to the design and construction of individual facilities. A new approach is required, one that reflects the complex interdependencies among the physical, social, and economic systems on which a resilient and vibrant community depends. Thus, modeling the resilience of communities and cities to natural hazards depends on many disciplines, including engineering, social sciences, and information sciences. Resilience assessment has become an imperative in many countries, including the United States, Europe and the Asia-Pacific Rim. The Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, headquartered at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado and involving 10 universities and nearly 100 investigators, was established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2015. The Center’s overarching goal is to establish the measurement science needed to study and understand the factors that make a community resilient, to assess the likely impact of natural (and eventually other) hazards on communities, and to develop risk-informed decision strategies that optimize both planning for and recovery from disasters. To accomplish this goal, the Center is engaged in three major research thrusts aimed at (1) developing the Interdependent Networked Community Resilience modeling environment (IN-CORE) to assess alternative community resilience strategies quantitatively; (2) instituting a standardized data ontology, robust architecture and management tools supporting the modeling environment; and (3) performing a comprehensive set of testbeds and hindcasts to validate this advanced modeling environment. Several community resilience testbeds have been initiated during the Center’s first year. These testbeds have been designed to: (1) allow Center research teams to initiate, test, and modify essential community resilience assessment models and algorithms before the IN-CORE platform becomes fully operational; (2) stress these assessment models in a controlled manner; (3) examine varying degrees of dependency between physical, social, and economic infrastructure systems; and (4) facilitate the interdisciplinary collaborations and approaches to community resilience assessment that will be essential for the Center to achieve its ultimate goal. This special issue of Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure is devoted to the first of these testbeds – the Centerville Virtual Community. Centerville is envisioned as a community in the Central United States that is susceptible to earthquake and tornado hazards. In most respects, it is a typical, middle-class, community of moderate size, with a median household income that is close to the national average in the United States and a diversified economy that includes commercial/retail, professional services, education/health care, industrial and government sectors. The physical infrastructure includes a variety of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, bridges and transportation facilities, and utility networks. The physical, social, and economic systems, and