EAGER: SAI: Collaborative Research: Conceptualizing Interorganizational Processes for Supporting Interdependent Lifeline Infrastructure Recovery

加强美国基础设施（SAI）是NSF的一项计划，旨在促进以人为本的基础和潜在的变革性研究，以加强美国的基础设施。有效的基础设施为社会经济活力和广泛改善生活质量奠定了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门创新，促进经济增长，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供的效率，加强社区建设，促进机会平等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，并推动美国的领导地位。为了实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI专注于人类推理和决策，治理，社会和文化过程的知识如何使建设和维护有效的基础设施，改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程的进步。美国的生命线基础设施，如饮用水，电力系统和地面交通，包括技术，组织和专业知识，让美国人活着和工作。它们高度相互依赖，需要彼此的正常运作。然而，太平洋西北地区的基础设施对卡斯卡迪亚俯冲带（CSZ）地震（9.0级以上）的准备不足，在未来45年左右的时间里，这种地震的概率为7-15%。它可能会同时摧毁或破坏许多基础设施，使生活在几个月或几年的困难，因为这些生命线正在整个地区缓慢恢复。本项目研究如何运营商和管理人员，特别是专家的工作人员谁保持饮用水，电网和地面交通基础设施去准备处理这种罕见的极端危险。这项研究的目的是改变美国如何为下一次CSZ地震做准备，通过改善地震后相互依赖的基础设施的协调准备和恢复，并告知这些相互依赖的基础设施是如何设计，开发和维护的，以提高其弹性和可持续性。在协调恢复这些不同的生命线基础设施时避免浪费可以每天挽救数千人的生命以及数百万美元的美国经济。研究小组正在进行桌面应急响应演习，详细的访谈和小组讨论，并与控制室操作员，维护主管，实时支持人员以及饮用水，电网，地面交通基础设施。这些活动有助于识别关键的共享或相互关联的控制变量（例如，电压、储层释放速率、管理结构），如果没有确认和规划，可能会严重妨碍协调恢复。这些数据用于开发基于代理的模型（ABM），这是一种计算机模型，将人类行为数据纳入对各种情况做出响应的“代理”的设计中，以确定各种地震和基础设施响应场景的结果，而不是访谈/讨论/演习工作中使用的结果。华盛顿和俄勒冈州这两个最容易受到CSZ地震影响的州的基础设施规划和应急响应的关键信息提供者将在整个项目中得到咨询和通知，以最大限度地发挥其价值，并通过政策简报、白色文件和演示文稿将结果更广泛地分发给多个利益相关者，以提高其对从业人员的价值。该项目旨在为进一步研究和开发新的决策辅助工具提供科学依据。该项目建议将社会科学（例如，组织运营分析、信任、价值）和工程理论和方法（例如，弹性工程，ABM）在很大程度上是未经测试的，但有可能提供第一次深入了解如何组织间的过程支持或阻碍相互依赖的基础设施的协调恢复。尽管CSZ地震事件的独特性，预计通过该项目产生的许多新知识将推广到其他灾害和地区，因为在其他灾害事件中确实同时发生多个基础设施的故障。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.American lifeline infrastructures, such as drinkable water, power systems, and ground transportation, include technology, organizations, and expertise that keep Americans alive and working. They are highly interdependent and require each other’s functioning for normal operation. Yet Pacific Northwest infrastructures are under-prepared for the Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ) earthquake (magnitude 9.0+), with a 7-15% probability over the next 45 years or so. It likely will destroy or damage many infrastructures at the same time, making life difficult for months or years as these lifelines are slowly restored across the region. This project examines how operators and managers—specifically, the expert staff who keep the drinkable water, power grid, and ground transportation infrastructures going—are prepared to handle such rare extreme hazards. The aim of this research is to transform how the U.S. prepares for the next CSZ earthquake, by improving coordinated preparedness and recovery of interdependent infrastructures after the earthquake, and informing how these interdependent infrastructures are designed, developed, and maintained to enhance their resilience and sustainability. Avoiding waste in coordinated recovery of these various lifeline infrastructures could save thousands of lives as well as millions of dollars to the U.S. economy every day.The research team is conducting table-top emergency response exercises, detailed interviews, and group discussions and with control room operators, maintenance supervisors, real-time support staff, and managers across potable water, the power grid, and ground transportation infrastructures. These activities help to identify critical shared or interconnected control variables (e.g., electrical voltages, reservoir release rates, management structures) that may severely hamper coordinated recovery if not acknowledged and planned for. These data are used to develop an agent-based model (ABM), a computer model that incorporates human behavior data into the design of “agents” who respond to various situations, to identify the outcomes of various earthquake and infrastructure response scenarios beyond those used in the interview/discussion/exercise work. Key informants in infrastructure planning and emergency response in Washington and Oregon, the states most vulnerable to consequences of a CSZ earthquake, will be consulted and informed throughout the project to maximize its value, with wider distribution of results to multiple stakeholders through policy briefs, white papers, and presentations to enhance its value for practitioners. The project aims to provide scientific evidence for a new decision-aid tool to be further researched and developed. This project’s proposed integration of social science (e.g., organizational operations analysis, trust, values) and engineering theories and methods (e.g., resilience engineering, ABM) is largely untested but has the potential to provide first insights into how interorganizational processes support or hinder coordinated recovery of interdependent infrastructures. Despite the uniqueness of a CSZ earthquake event, it is expected that much of the new knowledge generated through this project will be generalizable to other disasters and regions, given that failures of multiple infrastructures do occur simultaneously in other hazard events. Anonymized qualitative data and open-source simulation software will be made publicly available for other researchers and practitioners.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.