Community Resilience

NIST only participates in the February and August reviews.

The research objective for Community Resilience is to develop science-based tools to assess resilience and support informed planning and decision making to improve resilience in communities of all sizes.

There is a need for metrics and tools that support assessment of community resilience that account for life safety, functionality of buildings and infrastructure systems during and after a hazard event, and time and costs associated with restoration of system functionality and services. Metrics and tools for community resilience will enable identification and evaluation of alternative solutions and associated benefits.

Tools (e.g., guidance, models, decision support methodologies) will be developed as part of a science-based systems approach to community resilience for buildings and infrastructure systems that includes (1) identifying performance and recovery goals based on their role in the community and the social and economic services and functions that they support; (2) assessing system performance, damage levels, and loss of functionality following a hazard event; (3) characterizing dependencies among and between systems; (4) and determining the duration of recovery for physical, social, and economic systems and their impact on the community.

Expertise is desired in a number of disciplines, including engineering (civil, industrial, operations research, computer science) and social sciences (sociology, human geography, decision science) to address a variety of research areas in a multi-disciplinary approach. Research topics include modeling of community physical, social, and economic systems; assessment of physical infrastructure functionality, dependencies, damage, and recovery; hazard modeling at a community scale; analysis of social needs and organizations and their dependency on the built environment; decision making methodologies that account for short and long-term impacts and consequences; evaluation of alternatives relative to community goals; and interdisciplinary research and modeling, data visualization, and programming (software architecture, web application development).

Buildings; Infrastructure systems; Social systems; Community resilience; Metrics; Decision making; Systems modeling; Engineering; Social Science; Operations research; Mathematical programming; Systems analysis; Risk analysis;

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens