Toward Human-Centered Simulation Modeling for Critical Infrastructure Disaster Recovery Planning

Abstract

Critical infrastructure is vulnerable to a broad range of hazards. Timely and effective recovery of critical infrastructure after extreme events is crucial. However, critical infrastructure disaster recovery planning is complicated and involves both domain-and user-centered characteristics and complexities. Recovery planning currently uses few quantitative computer-based tools and instead largely relies on expert judgment. Simulation modeling can simplify domain-centered complexities but not the human factors. Conversely, humancentered design places end-users at the center of design. We discuss the benefits of combining simulation modeling with human-centered design and refer it as human-centered simulation modeling. Human-centered simulation modeling has the capability to make recovery planning simpler and more understandable for critical infrastructure and emergency management experts and other recovery planning decisionmakers.We qualitatively analyzed several resilience planning initiatives, post-disaster recovery assessments, and relevant journal articles to understand experts and decision-makers' perspectives. We propose a conceptual design framework for creating human-centered simulation models for critical infrastructure disaster recovery planning. This framework consists of three constructs: 1) user interaction with design features that end-users interact with, including model parameters assignment, decision-making support, task queries, and usability; 2) system representation that refers to system components, system interactions, and system state variables; and 3) computation core that represents computational methods required to perform processes. Keywords-resilience and recovery planning, critical infrastructure recovery, simulation modeling, human-centered designI.

Emergency management capabilities of interdependent systems: framework for analysis

“…As highlighted in Table 3, the selected literature was examined and compared against different methodological approaches (i.e., simulation, analytical, and descriptive modeling) and study objectives. Most studies adopted simulation models as in Ganji and Miles (2018), who investigated the benefits of integrating simulation modeling and human-centered design to support and simplify collaborative planning for CI recovery. Li et al (2019) developed a framework to model and simulate the network dynamics of inter-and intraorganizational coordination in the infrastructure domain.…”

Participatory Disaster Recovery Simulation Modeling for Community Resilience Planning

“…Subsequent work led to the first version of the open source recovery simulation library DESaster 1 (Miles 2018a). Currently, the deployable codebase of DESaster exclusively represents housing recovery related to single-family wood-frame houses; modules for simulating utility infrastructure recovery are under development (Ganji and Miles 2018). DESaster is implemented in the Python programming language and has been designed to be transparent, modular, and extensible.…”

“…To make DESaster suitable for participatory modeling, interactive and visual interfaces are needed that are created using human-centered design principles and implemented to be flexible, adaptable, and extensible (Ganji and Miles 2018). Little to no formal research has been done to develop visual analytics that facilitate understanding of community resilience relationships and dependencies between hazard loss and disaster recovery data (simulated or empirical) or to understand the implications of scenariobased processes across different spatiotemporal scales (Miles 2014).…”

“…The interview transcripts were compiled, but not systematically analyzed, to inform low-fidelity mockups (sketches) of alternative interface designs, as well as to provide a reference for implementing the prototype. Further design iterations of interface prototypes for visualizing DESaster outputs are ongoing (Ganji and Miles 2018).…”