A Flood Resilience Analytics Framework for Housing Infrastructure Systems Based on Dempster–Shafer (Evidence) Theory

Abstract

Resilience is defined as the enduring capacity of a system or infrastructure system against natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes and to restore to stipulated performance limits after the occurrence of disasters. Quantifying the flood resilience of infrastructure is of utmost importance for stakeholders, policymakers and concerned government bodies. It is essential to develop strategies in devising mechanisms to make communities resilient. Creating a community resilient involves the accumulation of factors associated with social as well as physical infrastructure. In this study, a flood resilience modeling and quantifying scheme is proposed for the housing infrastructure system. Quantifying resilience consisted of engulfing evidence/data in a community through a rigorous field survey and experts’ opinions. The information collected from different sources understandably suffers from uncertainty, incompleteness, and subjectiveness; consequently, their credibility level cannot be assured. To address these problems, the Dempster–Shafer theory is adopted in this study to address the inherent uncertainty, vagueness, and subjectivity with lack of information. The research proposes a framework to compute the “belief of resilience” over the desired frame and the belief propagation at different hierarchy levels to subsequently quantify resilience. A case study is implemented using the developed flood resilience modeling framework facilitating informed decision making.