Challenges in Community Resilience Planning and Opportunities with Simulation Modeling

Abstract: The importance of community resilience has become increasingly recognized in emergency management and post-disaster community well-being. To this end, three seismic resilience planning initiatives have been conducted in the U.S. in the last decade to envision the current state of community resilience. Experts who participated in these initiatives confronted challenges that must be addressed for future planning initiatives. We interviewed eighteen participants to learn about the community resilience planning process, its characteristics, and challenges. Conducting qualitative content analysis, we identify six main challenges to community resilience planning: complex network systems; interdependencies among built environment systems; inter-organizational collaboration; connections between the built environment and social systems; communications between built environment and social institutions' experts; and communication among decision-makers, social stakeholders, and community members. To overcome the identified challenges, we discuss the capability of human-centered simulation modeling as a combination of simulation modeling and human-centered design to facilitate community resilience planning.