Spatially‐aware systems engineering design modeling applied to natural hazard vulnerability assessment

Abstract

Human socio-technical systems are particularly vulnerable to natural and manmade disasters that project vast physical effects on interdependent functional infrastructure. Many disciplines are trying to understand the complex interactions between the physical world and the systems at risk within it. Systems engineering design is directly concerned with relationships between requirements, functions, and the physical architecture that implements functions. This paper explores the use and advantages of systems engineering design modeling that has been made sensitive to the spatial effects of the physical world by using a geographic information system (GIS) to represent elements of the physical architecture. The paper begins with a description of the spatial context and geographic information systems technology. We review how the spatial context is presently manifested in systems engineering and design modeling and then describe how we combined a geospatial model with a systems engineering design model and explored the unique views that the combined conceptual models introduce. We present a process approach developed for the natural hazard vulnerability domain and discuss our findings to date and the challenges that resulted from mixing models of greatly different fidelity. We conclude by suggesting future work that is needed to further investigate

Recommendations for the quantitative analysis of landslide risk

“…This is not explicitly accounted for using the previous methods, but can be included in multi-hazard analysis by resorting to techniques that are able to dynamically modify the event trees according to functional behaviour rules (Eveleigh et al 2006(Eveleigh et al , 2007. This is a new and challenging approach that has been virtually unattempted in landslide studies.…”

Risk management for infrastructure corridors vulnerable to adjacent land development

“…Eveleigh, Mazzuchi, and Sarkani (2007) link a systems planning and design model to a geospatial model for the study of disaster planning under uncertainty. Andersen, Thompson, and Boykin (2004) develop a geography-based spatial decision-support tool for relative risk assessments of threats to biodiversity due to land uses associated with military missions on two US military bases.…”

Simplifying humanitarian assistance/disaster relief analytic models using activity-based intelligence

“…Geo-referencing should be the first step in the workflow rather than the last; this approach empowers the analyst’s discovery and retrieval through traditional geographic information system (GIS) spatial analysis applications such as SOCET GXP and ArcGIS, supports socialization of the model within a team (supporting knowledge management), and aids in model reuse for other objectives. GIS technology is good at managing data with a spatial component and exploiting spatial operators such as contiguity, intersection, enclosure, proximity, shape, and position to support advanced data query, processing, and fusion (Eveleigh et al , 2009). This approach also aligns with crisis mapping trends: according to CrisisMappers.net, “Crisis Mappers leverage mobile and web-based applications, participatory maps & crowdsourced event data, aerial & satellite imagery, geospatial platforms, advanced visualization, live simulation, and computational & statistical models to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies” (para.…”