New infrastructure model prioritizes disaster spending for vulnerable cities

A University of Houston engineering professor is helping cities, utilities and transportation agencies prepare for and recover from natural disasters. All these organizations face the same challenge: they know the next hurricane, flood, wildfire or other major disruption will occur, but they do not have enough resources to strengthen every vulnerable piece of infrastructure. 

The difficult question is deciding which investments will provide the greatest benefit before disaster strikes. The answer may well come from a mathematical model pioneered by Gino Lim, the R. Larry and Gerlene (Gerri) R. Snider Endowed Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering at UH. Lim and his team developed a model that accounts for real-world uncertainty, enhances system resilience, and helps decision-makers identify where limited resources should be directed first. 

“We developed a framework that helps determine where limited resilience dollars should be invested to maximize the likelihood that critical infrastructure can continue functioning and recover quickly after extreme events,” said Lim, who reported his work in the journal Computers and Industrial Engineering. “What makes this work different is that it explicitly accounts for uncertainty.”  

Decision-makers rarely know how severe the next disaster will be, which assets will be damaged or how long recovery will take. Rather than planning for a single scenario, Lim’s framework evaluates many possible outcomes and identifies investment strategies that provide the highest confidence that critical infrastructure will remain operational and meet recovery targets. 

Lim and his team, including Jian Shi, associate professor of electrical power engineering technology, and Lim’s doctoral student, Tugce Uslu Aktas, demonstrated the approach using both electric power and transportation networks.  

The results show that strategic investments in a relatively small number of critical assets can substantially improve the resilience of an entire system, helping agencies achieve stronger protection and faster recovery while staying within limited budgets.  

“The broader goal is to provide policymakers, emergency managers, utilities and infrastructure agencies with a practical decision-support tool that helps answer two fundamental questions: How much should we invest in resilience, and where should we invest to achieve the greatest impact?” said Lim. 

As extreme weather events become more frequent and costly, making smart resilience investments before disasters occur is becoming increasingly important.  

“Our work helps decision-makers get the greatest resilience benefit from every dollar invested,” said Lim. 

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