Centerville Special Edition in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure

Enhancing community resilience in the future will require new interdisciplinary systems-based approaches that depend on many disciplines, including engineering, social and economic, and information sciences. The National Institute of Standards and Technology awarded the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning to Colorado State University and nine other universities in 2015 (including the University of Oklahoma!), with the overarching goal of establishing the measurement science for community resilience assessment. To this end, several of the researches within the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning have come together to develop the Centerville virtual community.

The Centerville Virtual Community Testbed is aimed at enabling fundamental resilience assessment algorithms to be initiated, developed, and coded in a preliminary form, and tested before the refined measurement methods and supporting data classifications and databases necessary for a more complete assessment have fully matured.  Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure has published a Special Issue introducing the Centerville Testbed, defining the physical infrastructure within the community, natural hazards to which it is exposed, and the population demographics necessary to assess potential post-disaster impacts on the population, local economy, and public services in detail.

The community has multiple residential and commercial zones with several types of buildings at different code levels.  The population of about 50,000 is diverse with respect to employment and income.  There are multiple public schools and government buildings located throughout the city as well as emergency facilities.  There are a few main roads, a simple highway system, some smaller local roads, and a few important bridges within the transportation system.  The Analytics Lab @ OU currently has a research paper in development relating to the study of transportation systems and we use Centerville testbed as one of our cases.

In addition to to the buildings and transportation system, Centerville also has a simplified electric power network (EPN) with multiple substation types (transmission, main grid, distribution, sub-distribution), a small power plant, and single-pole transmission lines. The community also includes a basic potable water system with pumps, tanks, reservoirs, a water treatment plant, and an underground piping system.  The maps associated with these infrastructure systems can be found in the Special Issue.

By creating such a detailed virtual community, researches can have a simplified but somewhat realistic platform for experimentation.  The papers included in the Special Issue cover topics such as multi-objective optimization for retrofit strategies, building portfolio fragility functions, performance assessment of EPN to tornadoes, and computable general equilbrium (CGE) assessment of the community with respect to disasters.

All papers included in the Special Issue are listed below.