Collaborative Research: RIPS Type 1: Human Geography Motifs to Evaluate Infrastructure Resilience

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This project will examine how shifting motifs in the everyday rhythms and tempo of people form, interdependently, with mobile transport and communications infrastructure. The resilience between dynamics of human and engineered systems is often challenged by small wrinkles in the motifs of human geography that may shift the timing and geography of populations and infrastructure off-normal. For example, delayed starts to the workday because of winter weather can bump peak commuting off-rhythm, delay the logistics of citywide delivery systems, or produce bursts in communications activity. While these may form as small local shifts from normal in particular places and times, they can transfer, diffuse, and adapt with unforeseen consequences and serious impacts on broader phenomena as diverse as commuting, the labor market, logistics, and urban management. Understanding how these dynamics arise, form, and spread through increasingly connected systems, as well as measuring and modeling them is critical if we are to plan for them, mitigate them, and manage them. Building this understanding requires an interdisciplinary approach that bridges engineering, informatics and computing, and the socio-behavioral sciences: a multipronged challenge that is indicative of the problems that a next-generation of students and engineers will face in designing, constructing, maintaining, and managing urban systems that are increasingly intertwined with, dependent upon, and adapting to the shifting and ever-evolving patterns of our activities. Similarly, getting the right data, metrics, and models to diverse groups of urban managers, engineers, and the public-at-large in ways that can usefully inform their understanding of interdependency will be critical in fashioning systems that can better weather such challenges. A starting point in investigating these connections is to explore conventional sources of data on human geography, but to also develop extensible systems that can use newly-forming data from location-aware technologies that produce rapid snapshots of whole populations in the messy context and complexity of everyday urban life. Novel analyses on these data can produce dynamically-evolving atlases and censuses of interdependency, from which motifs of behavior can be extracted and resolved, as land-use, activity, mobility, and sociality. These motifs can inform computer models designed to explore what-if dynamics between people, place, process, and infrastructure, that better frame and describe interdependency in activity, movement, access, and information. To assist in translating this research into the public domain, the project will formalize several outputs: a set of reusable data and model outputs accessible via a community Web portal, a pilot demonstration for winter weather scenarios in Washington DC that will fully explore scenarios of interdependency between human geography and mobile transport and communications infrastructure, and a set of code libraries for use in allied model systems. Through application to substantive issues of relevance in geography, informatics, and engineering, these outputs will enable other communities to apply and adapt these methods to their cities, data, and infrastructure.