Sustainable Disaster Recovery through Integrating Stakeholders' Preferences and the Host Community's Environmental Vulnerability

Abstract

Our built environment and communities are facing an increasing rate and magnitude of natural disaster. Accordingly, the different stakeholders are concerned about their investments' vulnerability. This requires a new generation of decision support tools that integrate the host community's vulnerability assessment while taking into account the stakeholders' interactions, needs, and preferences. This paper develops a prototype agent based model that utilizes an environmental vulnerability indicator to better guide the decision making process of the interrelated stakeholders. The four step researched methodology incorporates: (1) implementing an environmental vulnerability assessment tool; (2) developing the different stakeholders' objective functions, potential strategies, and learning behaviors; (3) creating an interdependent agent based model that simulates the associated stakeholders and the vulnerability indicator; and (4) interpreting and analyzing the results generated from the developed model. The proposed prototype model was developed and tested on the post-Katrina development in three coastal Mississippi counties. The model optimized the different stakeholders' decision actions that increased their individual utility functions and decreased the host community vulnerability. This research approach should collectively maximizes the host community welfare and decreasing its environmental vulnerability, thus, achieving a sustainable disaster recovery.

Meeting Name

Construction Research Congress 2016: Old and New Construction Technologies Converge in Historic San Juan, CRC 2016 (2016: May 31-Jun. 2, San Juan, Puerto Rico)

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Autonomous agents; Computational methods; Decision making; Decision support systems; Disasters, Community vulnerability; Decision making process; Decision support tools; Environmental vulnerability; Objective functions; Utility functions; Vulnerability assessments; Vulnerability indicators, Sustainable development

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-078447982-7

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jun 2016

Link to Full Text

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