Decision Support Tools for Earthquake Recovery of Businesses

This report summarizes the progress made in the first year of a collaborative project between researchers at Kajima and two CUREe institutions, Caltech and Stanford University. The project is part of Year 2 and Year 3 of Phase ill of the CUREe-Kajima Joint Research Program. The goal of this two-year CUREe-Kajima project is to develop quantitative methodologies and a prototype software package to implement a decision support system (DSS) which can be used by corporate management to enhance the recovery of their business after a disruptive earthquake. In developing this DSS, it is necessary to specify the type of business to which it is to be applied. In the first-year of this project, the focus was on a corporation which owns multiple leased office buildings that have suffered, or may suffer, damage during an earthquake. The core problem that was addressed of determining an optimal strategy for repairing the buildings is also relevant to any company that owns facilities. The basic objective of the project is to show how a DSS can be developed which could be used by management to make better decisions in restoring the state, or health, of their business after an earthquake. It is envisaged that the DSS could be used by the managers of a company to perform complex "what if" analyses to evaluate alternative recovery strategies and to determine the best one, based on post-earthquake information and economic and other constraints. In addition to its use after a damaging earthquake, the DSS could also be used prior to any earthquake to investigate which mitigation actions and planning efforts should be more effective in enhancing the business recovery process.