ETA 2021 Strategic Plan - Flipbook - Page 12
Focus Areas
The Resilient Communities and Infrastructure
Initiative comprises three focus areas that
span our scientific expertise: (1) Metrics and
Measurements to enable the quantification,
evaluation and tracking of resilience; (2)
Modeling, Prediction, and Simulation to support
risk assessment and decision-making tools;
and (3) Technologies and Processes at Scale to
provide design, operational, and community
response strategies.
These research focus areas are framed
according to the foundational questions
emphasized within each of them, and the
scientific approach is undertaken to answer
those questions.
Metrics and Measurement
Research Summary
Even as the evolution of our natural
environment presents new challenges for
adaptation and mitigation, our communities will
continue to thrive, attaining dramatic increases
in the quality of life. That is the vision driving
this research. New technology and processes
will enable our building infrastructure and its
interfaces with grid and transportation systems
to dynamically adapt to external stressors.
Improving quality of life and supporting the
ability of community-scale infrastructure to
adapt will result in tremendous economic and
human health benefits. This initiative is targeting
two key impacts and associated goals.
Reductions in economic loss following natural
disasters, achieved through:
• Improved infrastructure fortification levels
(resistance to failure, time to repair)
• A reduction in the time required to return a
building to a habitable state (survival)
• A reduction in the time required to restore
or maintain principal building services
(comfort and productivity)
Near-zero mortality and trauma, due to:
• Enhanced forecasting of infrastructure
stressors and severity
• Robust communication and guidance
systems for public response before, during,
and after major events and chronic risks
• Increased investment in and adoption of
resilience technologies and practices
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To attain a concrete grasp of what resilience
encompasses, it is necessary to determine the
“first principles” that govern the resilience of
our buildings and their interfaces to energy
and transportation systems. These principles
determine what to measure; how to measure it;
and what metrics to quantify, track, or optimize
in our designed solutions. This area focuses on
two major tasks: (1) development of actionable
metrics, and (2) development of sensing and
monitoring solutions.
A core task of this focus area is to develop
actionable metrics across diverse temporal and
spatial scales, built on the aforementioned first
principles. This includes both unified metrics
that encapsulate multiple dimensions of
resilience, as well as complementary constituent
metrics. For example, body mass index, credit
scores, and ENERGY STAR scores are unified
metrics that describe complex states of physical
health, financial health, and building energy
efficiency. Blood pressure, debt payment history,
and energy use intensity are related secondorder constituents. This area will seek to identify
similar analogies for resilience.
The broad scope and multiple impacts of
resilience necessitate a suite of metrics. There
will likely be separate metrics for: (1) human
health and safety (e.g., loss of life), (2) asset value
(damage to property), and (3) operational value
(e.g., loss of business continuity associated with
health, safety, and service levels). Asset value
metrics will need to quantify structural resilience,
while operational value will need to quantify
the resilience of building services. Metrics may
be computed differently for individual buildings
versus aggregations of buildings — such as a
city block or a neighborhood — that may need
to account for shared energy and transportation
services. These resilience metrics should be
related to existing and emerging metrics for
climate change mitigation and adaptation to
assess solutions that optimize both these goals.
Complementary to the development of
appropriate metrics, new sensing and
monitoring solutions must be deployed to
provide the data to compute these metrics at
various spatial and temporal resolutions, ensure
the health and performance of engineered
systems, inform models and forecasts, and track
system state over time. What is the optimal
design of sensor networks to monitor and track
resilience and the occurrence of acute and
chronic stressors? What is the necessary density
and location of these networks for diverse
applications? How can passive sensing be
combined with active approaches that regularly
probe and examine our infrastructure systems
to determine their current state?
The networks of sensors required for
understanding the state of our built environment
can be thought of as another “utility” that we
depend on for society’s day-to-day functioning.
The information services provided by this utility
will draw on many different types of sensor
networks, such as those embedded in buildings
(e.g., temperature or indoor air quality), remote
sensing (e.g., satellite or drone imagery), and
virtual sensing using data streams collected
for other purposes (e.g., cell phone location or
hospital admissions data). These disparate data
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