BRITE Fellow: A New Paradigm of Equitable and Smart Multi-Hazard Resilience Modeling (ENSURE)

This Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering (BRITE) Fellow project seeks to disrupt and transform the way we model infrastructure resilience and support just investments in infrastructure. Reliable, effective functioning of infrastructure during and following hazard events, like earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods, is essential to public safety, economic vitality and quality of life. Risk-informed decisions that promote resilience (or the ability of infrastructure to withstand, adapt to and recover from such stressors) require confident predictions of system performance now and into the future. However, this future brings uncertainties regarding dynamic, evolving conditions; challenges with respect to a legacy of disparate impacts of natural hazards and infrastructure (under)investment; and opportunities related to smart systems and emerging data and algorithms. The new paradigm of Equitable and Smart Multi-Hazard Resilience Modeling (ENSURE) provides the methodological advances and contextual fabric for transforming infrastructure resilience modeling to a practice that is both smart and equitable. Resulting benchmarks and opensource tools not only propel research advances in this field, but can benefit society through improved infrastructure safety and socially equitable quality of service in hazard-prone regions. The specific goals of this project are to: 1) Infuse intelligence into resilience modeling (i.e., emerging data from smart systems and intelligent algorithms) to capture uncertain, evolving conditions. 2) Uncover and overcome inequities in data and algorithms that underpin such resilience quantification, essential to inform just resilience enhancement. 3) Design and disseminate benchmark studies across hazards, systems, and scales to evaluate the new paradigm of Equitable and Smart Multi-Hazard Resilience Modeling (ENSURE). 4) Facilitate community-engaged learning and implementation of ENSURE with a diverse team of students and community partners, while having a lasting impact on student training and broadening participation. 5) Initiate a virtual community of practice (VCoP) to support networking, exchange, and mentoring related to advancement of female faculty in the resilience modeling field. Overall, this high-risk, high-reward pursuit formulates a new infrastructure resilience modeling framework that can, for the first time, evolve with dynamic, uncertain conditions while uniquely targeting socially equitable data collection and model performance. New strategies will be posed to quantify and overcome the disparities not only in resilient infrastructure performance across socially vulnerably populations, but also inequities in our ability confidently predict this performance and support just interventions. 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.