Virtual testbeds for community resilience analysis: step-by-step development procedure and future orientation

Abstract

Virtual community resilience testbeds enable community-level inferences, convergence research, and serve as decision-making aids. Testbeds are critical for the verification and validation of emerging computational models and quantitative assessment frameworks of community-level disaster impacts, disruption, and recovery processes. This paper illuminates the significance of establishing a standardized approach for developing virtual community resilience testbeds and proposes a systematic schema for this purpose. The workflow facilitates testbed development by defining a series of steps, starting with specifying the testbed simulation scope. Arguing hazard and community modules are the principal components of a testbed, we present a generic structure for testbeds and introduce minimum requirements for initiating each module. The workflow dissects the testbed's architecture and different attributes of the components beneath these modules. The proposed steps outline existing relevant tools and resources for creating the building, infrastructure, population, organization, and governance inventories. The paper discusses challenges testbed developers may encounter in procuring, cleaning, and merging required data and offers the initiatives and potential remedies, developed either by the authors or other researchers, to address these issues. The workflow concludes by describing how the testbed will be verified, visualized, published, and reused. The paper demonstrates the application of the proposed workflow by developing a testbed based on Onslow County, North Carolina using publicly available data. To foster sharing and reusing of developed testbeds by other researchers, all supporting documents, metadata, template algorithms, computer codes, and inventories of the Onslow Testbed are available at the DesignSafe-CI. The procedure proposed here can be used by other researchers to guide and standardize testbed development processes, and open access to virtual testbeds to the broader research community.