This Smart & Connected Communities (S&CC) planning grant will lay the foundation for a new paradigm of “Smart Resilience” in which data emerging from smart systems is leveraged to improve the hazard resilience of communities. As modern cities are becoming increasingly smart and interconnected, a wealth of emerging data (e.g. camera, sensors, crowdsourced reports) poses both challenges and opportunities for enhancing resilience to natural hazards, such as flooding, which threaten the safety, prosperity and wellbeing of communities. In this planning grant the focus is on the short-term response phase of the “Smart Resilience” paradigm (during and immediately following a hazard event) and emphasize organizational impacts. A new framework will be advanced, SSSAFT (Smart Systems for Situational Awareness of Flood Impacts and Transportation Access). This framework leverages data from smart systems to support situational awareness of community organizations responsible for flood resilience decision-making. Target organizations are those responsible for emergency response, flood risk communication surrounding transportation safety, and healthcare services. Through a convergent project design, this planning grant will lay a foundation for disciplinary integration, offer the opportunity for data collection and data fusion, launch testbeds, and provide the community context and opportunity for knowledge co-production with stakeholders. Integration with local partners, new knowledge shared with the research community, and submission of an award that builds off this planning grant are expected by the end of the project.

This project harnesses expertise from Hydrology, Infrastructure Risk Modeling, Data Science and Machine Learning, and Organizational Psychology to derive methods for transforming situational awareness tools and understanding how this awareness can facilitate organizational functioning toward improved community resilience. Three key research questions are examined in this planning grant. First, data sources and technologies are explored that underpin future situational awareness tools to support smart resilience in flood prone communities. In question two the need for a probabilistic approach to generate intelligent information on flood condition and transportation access across communities is probed. Methods for information fusion are tested, forming the basis of a SSSAFT framework that can evaluate, for example, access to critical facilities or travel times to vulnerable populations. Finally, quantitative and qualitative information is collected via interviews and surveys to uncover the psychological and physical effects of incorporating SSSAFT into resilience-related decision processes and communications. This work will reveal how timely situational awareness affects organizational psychological resilience and the subsequent well-being of community members who depend on these first-response organizations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.