Methodology for Evaluating Community Resilience

Abstract

Community resilience is dependent on the functionality of building clusters and supporting infrastructure systems because these facilitate social and economic activities in a community. This paper seeks to help communities improve their resilience to natural hazards by developing a methodology, starting with estimation of a community’s current level of resilience and directly comparing it to the target level, allowing for the identification and mitigation of performance gaps by the community. Assuming that communities are working under limited resources available to improve their resilience, an important focus of this paper is on prioritizing performance gaps such that those with the greatest negative effect on the current level of resilience may be addressed with mitigation first. Finally, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted on alternative mitigation actions for each priority performance gap. The result is a set of cost-effective mitigation actions to be implemented that will address prioritized performance gaps between the community’s target and current levels of resilience, thus improving community resilience. The resilience evaluation methodology is demonstrated on a case study of the City of Boston using scenario hazard events simulated.