NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology

02/08/2026 | Press release | Archived content

Risk-Averse Community Resilience Planning Considering Retrofit and Insurance Incentives

Published
February 8, 2026

Author(s)

Tasnim Ibn Faiz, Kenneth Harrison, Zeinab Farahmandfar

Abstract

By taking proactive mitigation actions, a community can improve its resilience against natural disasters, which entails reducing vulnerability, minimising social impacts, and facilitating faster recovery. Mitigation planning for the built environment involves making appropriate decisions regarding strengthening interdependent utility network systems, adding redundancies, and retrofitting buildings. Due to the presence of numerous stakeholders with diverse socio-economic characteristics, different risk attitudes, and propensity to take voluntary actions, the planning problem is challenging, especially when the hazards, magnitudes, occurrence times, and impacts on the community's built environment and population are uncertain. An optimisation model, framed as a two-stage mean-risk stochastic programming model, was developed to address these challenges and support mitigation decisions. The optimisation model aims to minimise the costs and risks associated with hazards by integrating their impacts on the built environment and social functions. Under various incentive policies and risk preferences, the model helps generate decision alternatives and evaluate their effectiveness in achieving community resilience goals. A case study is presented using a community in Shelby County, Tennessee, subjected to earthquake hazards to demonstrate the model's capability to develop alternative mitigation strategies under varied risk preferences and incentive policies.
Citation
Structure and Infrastructure Engineering
Pub Type
Journals

Keywords

Community resilience, Mitigation planning, Risk-averse decision-making, Incentive allocation, Retrofit, Insurance

Citation

Faiz, T. , Harrison, K. and Farahmandfar, Z. (2026), Risk-Averse Community Resilience Planning Considering Retrofit and Insurance Incentives, Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, [online], https://doi.org/10.1080/15732479.2026.2626405, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=956766 (Accessed February 14, 2026)

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NIST - National Institute of Standards and Technology published this content on February 08, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on February 14, 2026 at 09:09 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]