Investments Planning for Optimizing Functional Recovery of Lifelines Subjected to Flood Hazard

How can we monetize flood resilience? Can data-driven models incentivize decision-makers to invest in flood mitigation measures? Do validated models exist to capture the full chain of weather-related disruptions? Can modern algorithms optimize resilience decisions using recovery performance indicators?

Recognizing the need to answer these critical questions, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched a series of pilot demonstration projects across several U.S. states. The goal of this initiative is to build a strong business case for resilience against multiple hazards, with a particular focus on climate impacts on transportation networks and the businesses that depend on them. As part of this initiative, our team was awarded a contract for the state of New Jersey. Using a tailored instance of our INFRARRED platform, we:

• Calculated flood-induced losses, considering both direct damage to road infrastructure and indirect economic losses from operational disruptions due to repair work.
• Assessed the Return on Investment (RoI) of different adaptation strategies under various climate scenarios.
• Identified optimal investment strategies to enhance functional recovery and maximize long-term resilience.

Methodology Highlights

• System-wide modelling of traffic flows under normal and abnormal conditions
• Robust damage models for niche structural typologies
• Stakeholder-informed disruption models correlating physical damages of assets with downtime and traffic restrictions
• Detailed simulation of the time-stepping recovery of the transport network as damaged assets are repaired using advanced traffic assignment algorithms
• NLP algorithms that correlate traffic alert transcripts (of past 20 years) issued by the DoT to inform drivers of potentially hazardous conditions due to rain with historic rainfall data assisting the development of asset-specific rainfall disruption models.
• Genetic algorithms for optimal infrastructure retrofitting in budget-constrained environments

Description of actual services provided by your staff within the assignment:

• Network traffic modelling
• Flood hazard, vulnerability and risk assessment
• Modelling of supply-chain disruptions for interconnected businesses
• Scenario-based calculation of direct and BI losses
• Consultation with stakeholders