Redefining Community Resilience: A Generalized Dynamic Formulation

The premise of community resilience hinges on preventing extreme events from becoming disasters through minimizing initial disruptions and ensuring quick recovery of the various community sectors. These sectors could be infrastructure, social or economic or a combination of such. Currently, the agreed-upon approach is that a community decided on the most important goals they wish to recover. However, it is not a surprise that many communities struggle with such selection. This is particularly the case with large metropolitan cities in which determining or agreeing on the most vital sectors to recover have proven challenging. In addition to the issue of which goals to recover, current resilient definitions are geared towards determining the recovery trajectory of social or economic sectors based on the initial infrastructure damage as opposed to integrating all sectors to define resilience. To that end, in this study a new formulation is proposed in which infrastructure social and economic sectors are seamlessly integrated to in a mathematical formulation to provide a new definition for community resilience. The underlying fundamentals of the proposed model hinges on the principle of a damped harmonic oscillator by assuming the behavior of a community in response to a hazard is equivalent to the response of a vibrating mass of finite stiffness and damping. We implemented the dynamic model by developing a novel finite element formulation capable of quantifying resilience both temporally and spatially. We then used the developed model to devise a suitable hazard-agnostic definition of community resilience. A test study will be provided and the model will be used to identify sensitive and vulnerable areas in the community as well as provide a spatial and temporal quantification of community resilience.