COMMUNITY RESILIENCE ASSESSMENT TOOLS BASED ON THE PEOPLES FRAMEWORK: WEB APP AND DESKTOP SOFTWARE

Measuring community resilience has been an exploding field of inquiry in the last decade. Many options for measuring resilience ranging from specific measurements to frameworks can be found in literature. Among the different options available, indicators are perceived as an important instrument to assess the resilience of communities due to the simplicity involved in the process. This paper introduces indicator-based software tools to compute the resilience of communities. The tools are implemented in the form of web and desktop application that is accessible from any platform. The algorithm adopted in these tools is based on the PEOPLES framework. PEOPLES is a framework for defining and measuring the resilience of communities at various scales. The presented tools allow the user to choose both the type of hazard and community (rural, urban, industry) against which the resilience is measured. These inputs identify what indicators should be considered and suggest what weighting factor each indicator should take. The software tools take as inputs the performance of the indicators before and after a disaster event as well as the restoration time. The output is presented in the form of a resilience curve of the whole community. The developed tools have been tested to assess the level of resilience of San Francisco. Results of the case study show that the developed tools allow decision makers to derive key aspects on which most effort should be placed to improve their community resilience.