Development of flood resilience framework for housing infrastructure system: Integration of best-worst method with evidence theory

Abstract

Housing infrastructure is the basic need of living, and due to disaster, many houses got damaged. Therefore, assessing resilience for housing infrastructure against a flood hazard is an important task for any community as it gives the real scenario of the capability to resist and recover from the disaster after the occurrence of the hazard. The process of resilience quantification requires a different type of information from different sources, and due to which uncertainty and incomplete data may get involved. There is significantly limited literature available focusing on housing infrastructure resilience; however, the available literature has not incorporated such uncertainty and incomplete information. Therefore, in this work, a resilience assessment framework for housing infrastructure is proposed using a combination approach of Best Worst Method and a Hierarchical Evidential Reasoning based on the Dempster-Shafer theory against flood hazard. The proposed framework is then implemented in Barak valley North-East India to quantify that valley’s resilience and evaluate the model. Initially, different resilience attributes are selected, and based on experts’ opinion, the Best Worst Method rates the criteria to find the weightage. After finding the weightage, flood resilience is evaluated by using the Dempster-Shafer rule of combination. Lastly, sensitivity analysis is also performed to investigate the sensitivity of all the attributes of the proposed hierarchical housing infrastructure resilience model. The proposed flood resilience assessment model generates satisfactory results which indicate the condition state of resilience along with the unassigned degree of belief or uncertainty.