Community resilience assessment via agent‐based modeling approach

Abstract In this paper, a comprehensive community‐level model is developed advancing the use of agent‐based modeling for the purpose of community resilience planning. Agents to simulate businesses, healthcare system, and people are introduced, which are utilized along with a set of developed agents for the education system, utilities, and households to create an agent‐based model of the Centerville testbed subjected to tornado hazards. Resilience measures are also introduced to quantify the resilience of the community and its systems and make it possible to assess various strategies related to pre‐disaster preparedness for informed decision‐making. The results show the capability of the proposed computational model to capture the complex behaviors and dynamics of interdependent systems within a community and to evaluate the impact of disruptions on the community as well as a series of resilience measures (mitigation strategies) for the purposes of community planning. Therefore, the proposed model and its findings could provide a new tool for interested community stakeholders and decision‐makers assessing mitigation strategies to enhance the recovery time and resilience of the community.