Seismic Resilience of Communities – Conceptualization and Operationalization

A conceptual framework which defines the seismic resilience of communities and quantitative measures of resilience in a manner that can be useful for a coordinated research effort focusing on enhancing this resilience is one of the main themes at the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER). This framework relies on the complementary measures of resilience: “Reduced failure probabilities”, “Reduced consequences from failures”, and “Reduced time to recovery”. The framework also includes quantitative measures of the “ends” of robustness and rapidity, and the “means” of resourcefulness and redundancy. The ultimate objective of this work is to make the concepts that are presented here adaptable for the analysis of various critical infrastructure elements (both as individual systems and as interrelated sets of systems) exposed to both natural and man made disasters.