CAREER: Integrating Resilience and Social Vulnerability into the Management of Civil Infrastructure Systems

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project will advance our understanding of the influence of socioeconomic factors on differential impacts of infrastructure disruptions to different populations. The impact of the damage caused by natural hazards to critical civil infrastructure systems differs for various population groups because of social-vulnerability factors such as income/class, age, health status, and disability.

However, such disproportionate impacts are typically not considered in existing resilience assessment methods. Consequently, infrastructure-management decisions based on the existing methods ignore the differing needs of the most vulnerable populations in communities. This project will explicitly integrate social-vulnerability factors into infrastructure resilience models so that the needs of the most vulnerable populations in communities can be adequately considered in resilience improvement decision-making processes.

The award will also support an educational program to train a diverse group of future civil engineers to tackle the challenges faced by the built environment and provide them with the knowledge they need to be effective decision-makers. The community outreach component of the project will increase awareness of issues related to the impact of natural hazards on infrastructure systems and motivate communities to support resilience-improvement policies.

The primary research goal of the project is to formulate infrastructure-resilience models and metrics that integrate social-vulnerability factors to guide pre-disaster resilience improvement and post-disaster recovery planning. Specific research objectives include: (i) formulate a new resilience assessment model and system-performance metrics considering social vulnerability, (ii) create a multi-criteria decision-making framework to guide resilience improvement, (iii) formulate a multi-objective resilience-driven optimization model for post-disaster recovery planning, and (iv) evaluate the new methods using testbeds to appraise their ability to inform pre-disaster resilience improvement and post-disaster recovery planning.

The new methods will go beyond current resilience models by considering social vulnerability. The project will also provide new resilience-based component-importance metrics to help identify infrastructure components that should be the focus of resilience-improvement actions. Additionally, new knowledge about the effectiveness of various resilience-improvement measures will be gained, which will inform decisions on selecting appropriate measures.

Further, the project will help ensure that decision-makers are aware of the social inequities brought by disruptions to infrastructure systems. Such awareness is the first step in ensuring that infrastructure managers explicitly consider social vulnerability in infrastructure systems’ design, operation, and management.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.