Dynamic Modelling of Critical Infrastructures for Improved Disaster Habitation Recovery

Natural disasters damage infrastructure systems that support housing habitability, leading to population displacement. Recovery efforts speed up infrastructure capacity restoration and, thereby, rehabitation by displaced residents. Current recovery policy analysis methods focus on individual infrastructure systems or overall community recovery and are not focused on the impacts of built infrastructures on habitation. Many modelling methodologies are qualitative, do not capture the dynamic nature of infrastructure restoration or use single recovery metrics, thereby limiting their effectiveness for recovery planning. Rigorous modelling and quantification methods are needed to improve policy analysis and design. Using the system dynamics modelling methodology, the current work models and quantifies the impacts of realistic disaster recovery policies on habitation. The model is used to quantify and evaluate the policy effectiveness of selected disaster recovery initiatives derived from the literature in three performance dimensions. Specifically, it quantifies the habitation allowed by multiple community critical infrastructure systems, the scale of habitation loss and recovery duration. Modelled policies include increased resources, ease of access to public funding and accelerated administrative response to reduce process constraints in starting infrastructure repair. Results indicate that improving administrative response decreases habitation loss scale but does not significantly affect recovery duration. However, increasing accessibility to and amounts of public funding reduces the habitation loss scale and shortens recovery duration. The model structure is used to explain these results, which can facilitate improved analysis, identification of high‐leverage points and development of effective and efficient natural disaster recovery strategies.