Collaborative Research: RIPS Type 2: Quantifying Disaster Resilience of Critical Infrastructure-based Societal Systems with Emergent Behavior and Dynamic Interdependencies

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This project will create a way to measure the resilience of critical infrastructure-based societal systems (CISSs) that are necessary for community functioning. A CISS is comprised of interdependent buildings that together serve a community function and that are dependent on networks of critical lifelines (water, wastewater, power, natural gas, communications and cyber-communications, and transportation). They are a family of structures that are linked by occupancy type, people, policies, information, geographic location, and/or building services, and thus also rely on human, organizational, political, and cyber links. Examples of a CISS structure include, but are not limited to, a school district, a healthcare delivery system, a government building, a university campus, a hospitality facility, a residential building, or a central business district. The project will focus on the impact of single or compound hazardous events on CISSs. The initial loss of a structure due to physical damage can spread throughout the CISS or its supporting lifelines. Subsequently, these interdependencies are dynamic and change over time through human intervention, emergent organizational behaviors, and policy changes. Finally, repairs and work-arounds can diminish the impact of the hazardous event(s). As a test, the resulting framework and specific techniques will be demonstrated on one type of CISS: a healthcare system. Insights gleaned from this test case can be applied to improve, build, and maintain communities that are more likely to withstand disruption or disaster. This effort will directly inform practicing healthcare managers and emergency planners. The project will uniquely incorporate public policy, organizational policy, organizational behaviors and risk communication into a broader assessment of disaster resilience data of multiple hazards. An integrated approach will be used to describe the role of adaptation (organizational behaviors) and human interventions in interdependency dynamics. The project will seek to understand and model how organizational behaviors emerge and evolve during a disaster event. Moreover, it will study how cyber systems increase the impact of damage, resulting vulnerabilities to follow-on attacks, and approaches to prevent such escalation. Such approaches include risk communications strategies, using security systems and protocols, and taking other adaptive actions. How organizations work together to simulate and interpret reality, and how this can shift or change disaster response, will be studied. The impact of strategic communication on resilience will be measured. Analysis will require dynamic fault-tree and modeling of complex, adaptive systems with time-varying system states and changes. It will address the need for a computational framework for a large-scale model with significant dimensionality concerns. Additionally, educational and outreach tasks are aimed at strengthening the pipeline of women in STEM fields at multiple education and career stages by adopting a "360" mentorship philosophy that will foster training of female scientists of all ages to be high-caliber mentors.