A federated pre-event community resilience approach for assessing physical and social sub-systems: an extreme rainfall case in Hong Kong

Abstract

Comparative community resilience ranking illuminates resources prioritization in the pre-disruption mitigation process. Nonetheless, previous researchers address community resilience assessment in isolated manner by considering the technical side or social capabilities only. The myopic results generated from the solely designated assessment can be misleading and may affect the subsequent resilience building efforts. More importantly, a single modeling paradigm is insufficient to capture the disparate characteristic of interconnected socio-technical sub-systems in a community. This paper proposes a federated approach to assess the pre-event socio-technical community resilience. It assembles the topological-based evaluation, physics-based performance simulation, and multicriteria decision analysis into a unified framework whereby the results derived from the topological and physics-based methods are treated as inputs for the subsequent multi-criteria decision analysis model to generate comparative socio-technical community resilience ranking. A practical case in Hong Kong is used to demonstrate the applicability of the federated approach. Using the holistic socio-technical assessment results in the illustrative case, mitigation resources can be sensibly prioritized. The strategic implications indicate that the comparative resilience ranking outperforms the results produced by models focusing on the technical or social aspect only. Since the federated approach integrates the strength of multiple models when investigating the static structures and dynamic behaviors of complex socio-technical systems at the community level, it can lead to more reliable and balanced decision making process.