Fuzzy based tool to measure the resilience of communities

Last decades have been characterized by an increasing number of disasters all over the world. Therefore, the concept of community resilience has attracted the attention of the scientists who started to explore and assess the ability of communities to recover after undesirable events. In this work, a method for assessing the earthquake community resilience based on the PEOPLES framework is presented. PEOPLES is a framework that defines community resilience using seven dimensions. Each of the dimensions is defined through a set of indicators to describe the different aspects of resilience. The exact evaluation of the indicators is usually not possible due to the lack of deterministic data related to the damaged system after the disaster. The proposed method exploits a knowledge-based fuzzy modelling to allow the quantitative evaluation of the PEOPLES indicators taking into account uncertainties. The output of the implemented fuzzy method is a resilience index.