Feature Article: S&T Advances Decision-Support Tools for Infrastructure Resilience

The Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS (NAPSG) Foundation recently demonstrated the new Local Infrastructure Network Knowledge (LINK) Toolkit for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). LINK is designed to help emergency managers better understand how local infrastructure is interconnected so communities can strengthen resilience, improve preparedness, and recover faster.

Every community relies on essential systems and services to function, including clean water, sewage treatment, electricity, transportation, and communications networks. These are known as Local Significant Infrastructure (LSI), and any loss or damage to them can significantly affect the community and the people who live there.

A clear and complete understanding of LSI enhances disaster preparedness and planning, helps emergency personnel mitigate threats during catastrophic events, and supports faster recovery afterward. Strong situational awareness is also critical to the delivery of disaster assistance from state and federal agencies.

For example, a wildfire could ravage a neighborhood and create cascading impacts across local infrastructure. Contaminated runoff from firefighting efforts could enter the drinking water system. The fire could also damage a power substation, leaving neighborhoods and essential lifelines without electricity. Even though many communities already maintain LSI databases, providing thoroughly tested, standardized, and certified LSI solutions to every community can improve safety and support more effective response and recovery. That's where LINK comes in.

In response to requests from FEMA, S&T engaged NAPSG to develop a software toolkit that better addresses the need to identify and understand LSI. The recent demonstration gave Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Component stakeholders an opportunity to review LINK's progress toward this goal.

"As the research and development arm of DHS, we are assisting FEMA in supporting community resilience with local-level infrastructure, empowering emergency managers with improved decision-support tools," said S&T Program Manager Ron Langhelm. "In the wildfire scenario above, LINK could help identify water shutoff locations to protect the system, and it could quickly identify that a hospital and regional memory care center are without power while other specific facilities are not. It's these real-time infrastructure details that make all the difference."

LINK is not just a master LSI list or database. It is a toolkit that allows local governments and emergency managers to locate structures geographically, attach relevant contact information, and identify critical interdependencies among infrastructure assets. LINK can answer important questions about what is vital, how the loss of one asset could affect other LSI, and how those effects could cascade across systems. It can also simulate and model events before they occur, supporting emergency planning and hardening of key systems. Additionally, LINK allows local operators to verify the LSI connections and relationships predicted by the analysis, helping maintain ground truth.

Consider another scenario: An electricity substation may be in an area vulnerable to flooding. In a major flood, the loss of that substation could cause power outages. If the substation powers a wastewater treatment facility, that facility could also shut down, causing wastewater to overflow and creating a public health hazard. Identifying and predicting these types of cascading failures cannot be done with a simple list of LSI.

"By empowering communities with tools to identify their relevant infrastructure and any connections and interdependencies, LINK will help fill information gaps between owner-operators and federal data products, saving emergency managers valuable time in meeting incident planning and response requirements," said Langhelm.

Key LINK features:

• No special technical expertise required. LINK starts with standard models and examples, allowing users to fill in and validate information rather than start from scratch.
• Open-source foundation. Users can investigate the foundational knowledge graphs, relationships, weights, and databases.
• Custom artificial intelligence (AI) support. A custom AI-enabled analytic capability assesses infrastructure networks and identifies potential failure points, interdependencies, and cascading effects.
• Automated relationship modeling. LINK models relationships to predict LSI that may be missing from the inventory. Screenshot of LINK tool showing a list of water and wastewater systems in Arapahoe County Colorado, organized by different categories and types of facilities.
• Community-defined significance. Users can define what they deem significant, allowing each community to customize its analysis rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all model.
• Bring-your-own-data design. Infrastructure data is never stored, and local planners retain control of their data.
• Taxonomy- and ontology-agnostic structure. Users can bring their own data in the format they have.

LINK has already demonstrated promising capabilities, and an updated version incorporating stakeholder feedback is underway. The team is currently collaborating with MIT Lincoln Laboratory on a testing and evaluation workshop in late October and is targeting early 2027 for another demonstration. The anticipated release and transition date is spring 2028.

Communities will continue to face natural and human-caused hazards, but S&T and its partners are helping provide tools that can reduce impacts, strengthen resilience, and support faster, more effective recovery.

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