Integrated Physical-Social-Economic System Dynamics Modeling for Managing Extreme Events Induced Risk on the U.S.-Mexico Border Crossing Infrastructure

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Land border ports of entry are critical in both national and regional terms. By offering legal and safe crossing points, they help integrate people and economies between nations. Yet they also apply important controls and regulations. The border-crossing infrastructure, regional traffic flows, local economy, and broader societal activities in the region are highly interdependent in nature. The flows of people and trade in the system are largely determined by the capacity and efficiency of the transportation and inspections infrastructure. These interactions, which may include feedback adjustments to maintain equilibrium or a cascade of successive failures, have not been modeled in an integrated fashion and have not been well understood, making understanding the overall impacts of extreme events difficult. Extreme-event-induced sudden disturbances or security policy changes in one system often lead to cascading and undesirable effects on the others. The challenges of capturing the impact propagation are due to nonlinearity, stochasticity, and time lags of system dynamical interactions. This project will develop an integrated border infrastructure risk management framework, which entails two objectives. The first objective is to develop a System Dynamic (SD) based framework and a set of integrated models for the border physical-social-economic system. These models will serve as tools for understanding border system dynamics, predicting the impacts of risk reduction policies, evaluating mitigation strategies, and modeling recovery processes. The second is to develop a risk assessment and mitigation framework and models for the border region, with a particular emphasis on assessing the criticality of border crossing infrastructure systems, evaluating border security policy and operations, designing information dissemination and public and business preparedness schemes, and identifying transportation and inspection system operations strategies.