Exploiting smart cities with digital twins (SCDT) requires the integration of sensing and simulation across diverse infrastructure systems into community management. Community disaster management can provide a valuable foundation for SCDT development. The current work proposes and tests a conceptual model of a SCDT for disaster management and describes two threats to SCDT development that can be mitigated by focusing development on disaster management. Information loops, as opposed to individual components, are identified as a critical future focus of SCDT development. Primary contributions include support for SCDT development for disaster management, a conceptual SCDT for disaster management model, and a discussion of issues to be addressed in the development and deployment of SCDT for disaster management.

He was co-PI of two international EU-FIPSE funded grants. His scholarship agenda focuses on technological innovation, technological literacy, workforce development, and international dimensions of these fields. Increasingly, he has turned his attention to the field of technological innovation and the assessment of technological capability, understanding and innovation.Internationally he has worked in Germany,

Interdependencies between infrastructure sectors impact the recovery of communities in the post-disaster period. These interdependencies give rise to multiple feedback loops that drive and constrain recovery. Community leaders tasked with developing a recovery plan must allocate limited resources over time among numerous interacting sectors that need assistance. However, the interdependencies make it difficult to size and sequence the needs. A Descriptive Design Structure Matrix (DDSM) was developed to understand the impacts of community interactions on recovery and resourcing. The DDSM's simple, logical descriptions of infrastructure interactions help identify recovery bottlenecks. Community interactions were analyzed using Cambridge Advanced Modeler. Governance, Electric Power, Commerce, Road Transportation, and Workforce Population were identified as the five most critical sectors that interact with each other to form a core set of causal feedback loops for recovery. The DDSM model can complement existing resource allocation methodologies by providing a systematic and structured approach to sequence resources for a quick recovery from disasters.