The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded a $20 million cooperative agreement to Colorado State University (CSU) to establish the Community Resilience Center of Excellence. Working with NIST researchers and partners from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Oregon State University, University of Oklahoma, Rice University, Texas A&M University, the University of Washington, the University of South Alabama, the California Polytechnic University in Pomona and Texas A&M-Kingsville the center’s multi-disciplinary team includes experts in engineering, economics, data and computing, and social sciences.
The research team from OU is comprised of faculty and PhD students from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (members of the
analytix lab) and the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science.
Moore Medical Center in Oklahoma following the Newcastle-Moore tornado, May 20, 2013. Photo credit: NIST
Community disaster resilience includes preparing for anticipated hazards, adapting to changing conditions, and withstanding and recovering rapidly from disruptions. The goal of the Center of Excellence (COE) is to develop computer tools to help local governments decide how each can best invest resources to enhance community disaster resilience.
The centerpiece of the center’s effort will be NIST-CORE—the NIST-Community Resilience Modeling Environment. Built on an open-source platform, the computer model and associated software and databases will incorporate a risk-based approach to decision-making that will enable quantitative comparisons of different resilience strategies.
NIST-CORE will provide the scientific basis for developing resilience metrics and decision tools to support the resilience of the built environment and for evaluating cascading effects arising among interconnected infrastructure. In addition, models and tools will integrate social systems vital to the functioning and recovery of communities—health care delivery, education, social services, financial institutions and others.
As NIST-CORE is developed, its performance will be tested against data gathered from past disasters. Ultimately, NIST-CORE will be able to learn from one analysis to the next, a capability that does not exist in any other risk or disaster-resilience model in the world.
To learn more about NIST, visit www.nist.gov.
The full, unedited article is here: NIST COE Community Resilience
The NIST-CORE project page is here: Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning