Recovery planning for resilience in integrated disaster risk management

Minimizing recovery times after disasters that impact complex systems of multiple infrastructures, especially in urban settings, is a challenging problem. A major difficulty is untangling the web of interdependencies that intertwine infrastructure and the objectives and preferences of the various owners and operators involved. In this paper, the integration of a game-theoretic conflict resolution technique, the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution, with a probabilistic resilience and recovery planning method, the Graph Model for Operational Resilience, is proposed to achieve a novel negotiated coordination scheme. A case study demonstration is provided for a simulated multi-infrastructure disaster scenario. The results show a median recovery time decrease of 14% to 20% for population needs reliant on multiple types of infrastructure. The findings suggest promising utility of the approach to quicken recovery and may also be useful for encouraging information sharing among stakeholders interested in achieving such a goal.

I. Introduction

The global awareness of the need and opportunity to advance the management of risk to society from disasters is mounting. This is perhaps best exemplified by the United Nations (UN) Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. This voluntary framework, signed by 187 member states of the UN sets disaster risk reduction targets for 2015 through 2030. These targets include: substantially reducing disaster mortality and the number of people affected by disaster; decreasing direct economic loss from disasters; improving cooperation with developing countries; increasing the number of national and local disaster risk reduction strategies and the coverage of early warning and other disaster information systems; and significantly reducing the damage to critical infrastructure and the amount of disruption to essential services (see unisdr.org for more information). This last effort related to reducing the disruption of essential services is the motivation for this paper.