Developing Optimal Hazard Investment Strategies

Abstract

There has been a significant increase in natural disasters that have negatively affected the U.S. economy in recent decades. The Government Accountability Office reported that the U.S. is not well prepared to manage large-scale natural disasters either through emergency response or financial relief. It is essential to develop integrated post-disaster investment strategies that avoid many of the pitfalls that have been observed following recent catastrophic events. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to build theoretical foundation and demonstrate technologies for creating a decision support system for optimizing stakeholders' resource allocation in natural hazards. The proposed framework will: (1) minimize the total costs associated with implementing such investment strategies and (2) maximize the uniformity of welfare distribution among all associated parties. This would provide broad members of the emergency management community as well as policy makers with easy-to-use preparedness and decision support tool, which would help in creating better societal financial resilience towards natural hazards.

Meeting Name

Construction Research Congress 2010: Innovation for Reshaping Construction Practice (2010: May 8-10, Banff, Alberta, Canada)

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Catastrophic event; Conceptual frameworks; Decision support tools; Emergency management; Emergency response; Government accountability offices; Investment strategies; Investment strategy; Multi agent simulation; Natural disasters; Natural hazard; Policy makers; Post-disaster financial relief; Theoretical foundations; Total costs, Artificial intelligence; Decision making; Decision support systems; Decision theory; Disaster prevention; Disasters; Economics; Investments; Research; Risk management; Strategic planning, Multiobjective optimization

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-078441109-4

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2010 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 May 2010

Link to Full Text

Share

 
COinS