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Emergency services and utilities need appropriate planning tools to analyze and improve infrastructure and community resilience to disasters. Recognized as a key metric of community resilience is the social well-being of a community during a disaster, which is made up of mental and physical social health. Other factors influencing community resilience directly or indirectly are emotional health, emergency services, and the availability of critical infrastructures services, such as food, agriculture, water, transportation, electric power, and communications system. It turns out that in computational social science literature dealing with community resilience, the role of these critical infrastructures along with some important social characteristics is not considered. To address these weaknesses, we develop a new multi-agent based stochastic dynamical model, standardized by overview, design concepts, details, and decision (ODD+D) protocol and derived from neuro-science, psychological and social sciences, to measure community resilience in terms of mental and physical well-being. Using this model, we analyze the micro-macro level dependence between the emergency services and power systems and social characteristics such as fear, risk perception, information-seeking behaviour, cooperation, flexibility, empathy, and experience, in an artificial society. Furthermore, we simulate this model in two case studies and show that a high level of flexibility, experience, and cooperation enhances community resilience. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.


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Multi-Agent Based Stochastic Dynamical Model to Measure Community Resilience

Show Author's information Jaber Valinejad1( )Lamine Mili2C. Natalie Van Der Wal3
Data and System Science Lab, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech, Northern Virginia Center, Falls Church, VA 22043, USA
Department of Multi-Actor Systems, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, 2600 AA, the Netherlands

Abstract

Emergency services and utilities need appropriate planning tools to analyze and improve infrastructure and community resilience to disasters. Recognized as a key metric of community resilience is the social well-being of a community during a disaster, which is made up of mental and physical social health. Other factors influencing community resilience directly or indirectly are emotional health, emergency services, and the availability of critical infrastructures services, such as food, agriculture, water, transportation, electric power, and communications system. It turns out that in computational social science literature dealing with community resilience, the role of these critical infrastructures along with some important social characteristics is not considered. To address these weaknesses, we develop a new multi-agent based stochastic dynamical model, standardized by overview, design concepts, details, and decision (ODD+D) protocol and derived from neuro-science, psychological and social sciences, to measure community resilience in terms of mental and physical well-being. Using this model, we analyze the micro-macro level dependence between the emergency services and power systems and social characteristics such as fear, risk perception, information-seeking behaviour, cooperation, flexibility, empathy, and experience, in an artificial society. Furthermore, we simulate this model in two case studies and show that a high level of flexibility, experience, and cooperation enhances community resilience. Implications for both theory and practice are discussed.

Keywords: community resilience, collective behavior, emergency services, power systems, critical infrastructures, artificial society, overview, design concepts, details, and decision (ODD+D), cyber-physical-social system

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Received: 04 May 2022
Revised: 11 July 2022
Accepted: 08 August 2022
Published: 30 September 2022
Issue date: September 2022

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