Sustainable Disaster Recovery Framework: Reducing the Community Vulnerabilities throughout the Redevelopment Process

This paper presents a sustainable disaster recovery decision-making framework that meets the needs of the stakeholders in rebuilding damaged infrastructure while simultaneously decreasing the built environment\u27s social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities. Through utilizing agent-based modeling (ABM), the needs and preferences of the multi-sector stakeholders are integrated into the objectives of the modeled recovery agency. The proposed framework integrates well-established vulnerability indicators into the recovery agency\u27s objective function to better guide the redevelopment process. Through utilizing an individual learning module, the model optimizes the post-disaster recovery strategies to decrease the vulnerabilities of the built environment throughout the recovery phase while increasing the overall recovery rate. The proposed model was tested on the post-Katrina recovery in Mississippi. In comparison to the actual recovery data and simulation scenarios, the proposed model provided higher recovery rates and elevated the built environment vulnerability status to achieve long-term sustainable disaster recovery