PRIME: A CyberGIS Platform for Resilience Inference Measurement and Enhancement

Abstract

In an era of increased climatic disasters, there is an urgent need to develop reliable frameworks and tools for evaluating and improving community resilience to climatic hazards at multiple geographical and temporal scales. Defining and quantifying resilience in the social domain is relatively subjective due to the intricate interplay of socioeconomic factors with disaster resilience. To broaden upon it, the choice of indicators and their subsequent ranking for the aggregation into an index is subjective in nature. This aggregation is not empirically validated and is prone to omit the nuances of localized resilience changes and causal factors affecting it, while leading to oversimplified conclusions. Meanwhile, there is a lack of scientifically and computationally rigorous, user-friendly tools that can support customized resilience assessment with consideration of local conditions. This study addresses these gaps through the power of CyberGIS with three objectives: 1) To develop an empirically validated disaster resilience model - Customizable Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM), designed for multi-scale community resilience assessment and influential socioeconomic factors identification; 2) To implement a Platform for Resilience Inference Measurement and Enhancement (PRIME) module in the CyberGISX platform backed by high-performance computing, enabling users to apply and customize RIM to compute and visualize disaster resilience; 3) To demonstrate the utility of PRIME through a representative study to understand the geographical disparities of county-level community resilience to natural hazards in the United States and identifying the driving factors of resilience in the social domain. Customizable RIM generates vulnerability, adaptability, and overall resilience scores derived from empirical parameters—hazard threat, damage, and recovery. Computationally intensive Machine Learning (ML) methods are employed to explain the intricate relationships between these scores and socioeconomic driving factors. PRIME provides a web-based notebook interface guiding users to select study areas, configure parameters, calculate and geo-visualize resilience scores, and interpret socioeconomic factors shaping resilience capacities. A representative study showcases the efficiency of the platform while explaining how the visual results obtained may be interpreted. The essence of this work lies in its comprehensive architecture that encapsulates the requisite data, analytical and geo-visualization functions, and ML models for resilience assessment. This setup provides a foundation for assessing resilience and strategizing enhancement interventions.