Conceptualizing Interorganizational Processes for Supporting Interdependent Lifeline Infrastructure Recovery
National Science Foundation
September 1, 2021 – August 31, 2023
Abstract
Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.
American lifeline infrastructures, such as drinkable water, power systems, and ground transportation, include technology, organizations, and expertise that keep Americans alive and working. They are highly interdependent and require each other’s functioning for normal operation. Yet Pacific Northwest infrastructures are under-prepared for the Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ) earthquake (magnitude 9.0+), with a 7-15% probability over the next 45 years or so. It likely will destroy or damage many infrastructures at the same time, making life difficult for months or years as these lifelines are slowly restored across the region. This project examines how operators and managers—specifically, the expert staff who keep the drinkable water, power grid, and ground transportation infrastructures going—are prepared to handle such rare extreme hazards. The aim of this research is to transform how the U.S. prepares for the next CSZ earthquake, by improving coordinated preparedness and recovery of interdependent infrastructures after the earthquake, and informing how these interdependent infrastructures are designed, developed, and maintained to enhance their resilience and sustainability. Avoiding waste in coordinated recovery of these various lifeline infrastructures could save thousands of lives as well as millions of dollars to the U.S. economy every day.
The research team is conducting table-top emergency response exercises, detailed interviews, and group discussions and with control room operators, maintenance supervisors, real-time support staff, and managers across potable water, the power grid, and ground transportation infrastructures. These activities help to identify critical shared or interconnected control variables (e.g., electrical voltages, reservoir release rates, management structures) that may severely hamper coordinated recovery if not acknowledged and planned for. These data are used to develop an agent-based model (ABM), a computer model that incorporates human behavior data into the design of “agents” who respond to various situations, to identify the outcomes of various earthquake and infrastructure response scenarios beyond those used in the interview/discussion/exercise work. Key informants in infrastructure planning and emergency response in Washington and Oregon, the states most vulnerable to consequences of a CSZ earthquake, will be consulted and informed throughout the project to maximize its value, with wider distribution of results to multiple stakeholders through policy briefs, white papers, and presentations to enhance its value for practitioners. The project aims to provide scientific evidence for a new decision-aid tool to be further researched and developed. This project’s proposed integration of social science (e.g., organizational operations analysis, trust, values) and engineering theories and methods (e.g., resilience engineering, ABM) is largely untested but has the potential to provide first insights into how interorganizational processes support or hinder coordinated recovery of interdependent infrastructures. Despite the uniqueness of a CSZ earthquake event, it is expected that much of the new knowledge generated through this project will be generalizable to other disasters and regions, given that failures of multiple infrastructures do occur simultaneously in other hazard events. Anonymized qualitative data and open-source simulation software will be made publicly available for other researchers and practitioners.