The Centerville Virtual Community: a fully integrated decision model of interacting physical and social infrastructure systems

Enhancing community resilience in the future will require new interdisciplinary systems-based approaches that depend on many disciplines, including engineering, social and economic, and information sciences. The National Institute of Standards and Technology awarded the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning to Colorado State University and nine other universities in 2015, with the overarching goal of establishing the measurement science for community resilience assessment. The Centerville Virtual Community Testbed is aimed at enabling fundamental resilience assessment algorithms to be initiated, developed, and coded in a preliminary form, and tested before the refined measurement methods and supporting data classifications and databases necessary for a more complete assessment have fully matured. This paper introduces the Centerville Testbed, defining the physical infrastructure within the community, natural hazards to which it is exposed, and the population demographics necessary to assess potential post-disaster impacts on the population, local economy, and public services that are described in detail in the companion papers of this Special Issue.