CAREER: RecovUS - An Agent Based Model of Collective Post Disaster Housing Recovery

Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX

Investigators

Abstract

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program grant will study post-disaster housing recovery, using the micro-level of households' reconstruction decisions. It examines how those decisions are affected by a confluence of quantifiable internal and external control variables and propagated to influence community recovery. Anticipated exponential increases in future extreme events coupled with the growing population in disaster-prone regions has created an urgent need for better understanding of the process of disaster recovery and more effective strategies to enhance it. While many studies have focused on assessing the economic impacts of disasters or estimating its losses on a macro-level, very few, if any, have focused on modeling the collective actions taken by households which is deemed to be the key to community-wide recovery. The results from this research will have a broad impact, as they can be instrumental to the members of recovery assistance framework in prioritizing and integrating policies to enhance post-disaster recovery. The multidisciplinary nature of this research and its diversified pedagogy together with its embedded social interaction protocols will allow for a more effective research, teaching and a broader involvement of underrepresented groups as well as multiple stakeholders in related research. This research is aimed at contributing fundamental knowledge on the collective nature of households' community-wide recovery. This research will develop a GIS-enabled agent-based behavioral model of collective post-disaster housing recovery by capturing the micro-level dynamics of households' behavior within a broader socioeconomic context of their community. Both internal and external control variables will be examined. Internal control variables include households' demographics, social networks, experience, socio-economic, psychosocial factors, and disaster exposure. External control variables refer to activities that can influence households' recovery decisions and include the activities of members of the recovery assistance framework aimed at restoring economy and lifeline infrastructure and providing financial incentives along with any housing recovery activities by neighbors creating spatiotemporal effects. The project will integrate agent-based modeling, GIS, and game theory to help decipher the impact of households' interactions on the collective recovery of an affected community. This bottom-up approach will allow for simulation of interactions among households to mimic real events. These simulations will enable policyholders to assess the efficacy of their recovery policies through the developed model. The behavioral model will be modular, scalable, and can be easily extended to any type of disaster.