| dc.description.abstract | Communities are complex systems defined by the interaction of social, economic, environmental, and physical systems. Increasing rates and intensities of climatic natural hazards, coupled with rising urbanization and an increase in quality-of-life dependency on social and economic systems, underlines the importance of improving the resilience of buildings and infrastructure systems that play a key role in ensuring the functionality of the community's social and economic systems. Building codes are principal regulatory documents that aid in achieving this goal. However, building codes historically set their design-level performance goal with a primary focus on avoiding loss of life with limited considerations on how a building is actually used by its occupants or the broader community. To move towards resilience, the next generation of building codes should modify their design philosophy and extend their design goals to incorporate functionality-related performance goals into the design process, where functionality goals must include social, economic, and physical aspects of buildings and infrastructure.This study posits that organizations are the key lynchpin connecting buildings and infrastructure systems to social and economic systems. Utilizing the Community Capitals framework, we propose a novel framework for assessing the implications of disruptions in the accessibility and functionality of organizations contributing to the resilience of a community’s social and economic systems. The framework exemplifies the deliberate incorporation of organization-level functionality into community resilience and bridges the gap between the community’s social and economic characteristics with conventional engineering-focused community resilience frameworks through including the concept of accessibility. To identify components contributing to the functionality of an organization and define organizational functionality states, fault tree models were employed. In addition to conventional physical components and utilities, staff and supply chain are introduced as critical non-physical components contributing to the availability, acceptability, and adequacy of products offered by organizations. Defining accessibility as the use of available products by community members with reasonable effort and cost to meet an essential need, two novel metrics for measuring accessibility are developed. The metrics consider access from the perspective of both service users and providers and reconcile accessibility with organizational functionality by incorporating proximity, availability, acceptability, and adequacy dimensions in measuring accessibility to both tangible products and intangible services. To demonstrate the application of the framework the research used the Lumberton virtual community resilience testbed. Virtual testbeds are an effective tool to test, verify, and validate community resilience models and advance the state of knowledge on community resilience. The application of virtual testbeds is increasing as quantitative hazard research aims to move from component- and building-level modeling into the interdisciplinary space of community-level modeling for resilience. However, the characteristic of testbeds, their components, and development procedures was something embedded in published works, and somewhat ambiguous. Thus, we leveraged the current momentum on using virtual testbeds for community resilience analysis and performed a systematic literature review and an expert survey to dissect what testbeds are in practice. We, finally, defined testbeds as a virtual environment with enough supporting architecture and metadata to be representative of one or more systems such that the testbed can be used to (a) design experiments, (b) examine model or system integration, and (c) test theories. From the literature review, it was illuminated that the lack of a standardized and systematic approach for testbed development, testbed publication, or testbed reuse virtual testbeds is a significant issue that needs to be addressed. Thus, a systematic schema for testbed development is also proposed. The workflow facilitates testbed creations by introducing a generic structure defining minimum requirements for initiating a testbed and by defining a step-by-step development procedure. The application of the proposed workflow has been demonstrated by establishing a testbed based on Onslow County, NC using publicly available data in the United States. The testbed is shared using the DesignSafe-CI for reusing by other researchers. The other significant challenge in developing virtual community resilience testbeds is incorporating social systems and phenomena into testbeds. Social vulnerability indices are a convenient way to account for differential experiences and starting conditions of the population in resilience assessments. This dissertation proposes a scalable index, termed Social Vulnerability Score (SVS), to serve the purpose of testbed development. The SVS overcomes two important limitations of existing indices: it is constructed using an approach that does not decrease in validity with changing spatial resolution, and it only needs to be calculated for the geographic area of interest, instead of for the entire county thereby significantly reducing computational effort for testbed developers and users. The proposed SVS aggregates the ratio of a set of demographics from U.S. Census datasets at the desired location against their national average values. The resulting scores are mapped into five levels, called zones, ranging from very low vulnerability (zone 1) to very high (zone 5). The SVS model is incorporated into the Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE). Lastly, to exemplify the application of social vulnerability in the proposed framework, inequities in accessibility to schools after 2016 Hurricane Matthew were assessed across the different socially vulnerable populations in the Lumberton Testbed. | |
