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Digital Technologies, Complex Systems, and Extreme Events: Measuring Change in Policy Networks

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Multi-hazard Approaches to Civil Infrastructure Engineering

Abstract

The increasing incidence and mounting costs of extreme events globally in developed and developing societies alike create a compelling need to design effective methods of anticipating and reducing risk in practice. Three basic issues confound systematic measurement of the likely impact of hazards upon global communities: (1) scale of operations, (2) degree of uncertainty, and (3) rate of change in the interaction between hazards and human communities. Each of these issues involves access to, and flow of, information among a complex set of participating organizations and jurisdictions and can be partially addressed by advances in information technology, if designed and used appropriately. We examine different methods of digital data collection, analysis, and modeling that have been used to assess the complex, dynamic interactions between known hazards and communities at risk. We present applications of three digital technologies in reference to three different types of hazards: 2012 Superstorm Sandy, 2012 Pittsburgh International Airport fuel leak scenario, and the 2013 Yarnell Hill, Arizona, wildland fire. We conclude with a preliminary design for a complexity index to measure the interactions among operations, uncertainty, and rate of change over time in a region of risk and calibrate these measures against the existing capacity of a region’s sociotechnical system to manage risk.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Mark Voortman, postdoctoral fellow at CDM, assisted J. Yeo in this process.

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Acknowledgments

I acknowledge, with thanks and appreciation, the talented young researchers at the Center for Disaster Management, University of Pittsburgh, who assisted with the application of these technologies in the analysis and modeling of Superstorm Sandy and the Pittsburgh International Airport scenario. They are Brian Chalfant, Jee Eun Song, Mengyao Chen, Jungwon Yeo, Mark Voortman, and Brian Colella. I warmly thank Karim Hardy for his modeling of organizational interactions in the 2013 Yarnell Hill, Arizona, wildfire. We also acknowledge, with gratitude, the National Association of Workforce Boards for its support of the Sandy study and the Mitre Corporation for its support of the Pittsburgh International Airport study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Disaster Management, Graduate School of Public and Inernational Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA

    Louise K. Comfort

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  1. Louise K. Comfort
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Correspondence to Louise K. Comfort .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    Paolo Gardoni

  2. U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA

    James M. LaFave

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Comfort, L.K. (2016). Digital Technologies, Complex Systems, and Extreme Events: Measuring Change in Policy Networks. In: Gardoni, P., LaFave, J. (eds) Multi-hazard Approaches to Civil Infrastructure Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29713-2_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29713-2_25

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29711-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29713-2

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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