NIST Alternatives for Resilient Communities (ARC) Tool

NIST's Alternatives for Resilient Communities, or NIST ARC, is an interactive screening tool that is designed to assist communities in resilience planning.  The specific challenges addressed by ARC relate to the large scale and interdependencies of the community resilience planning system—this system includes those elements of our physical, social, and economic systems that determine a community’s resilience.  Given hazard and interdependency information, and socio-economic data, ARC outputs alternative sets of actions that can be taken across a community to meet user-specified resilience and other targets (e.g., cost).  The goal of ARC is to decrease a community’s burden in developing viable, sound alternatives for stakeholder consideration and to provide useful starting points for further, more detailed analysis.

ARC is designed to assist a collaborative planning team in the identification of solutions as outlined in NIST’s Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems.  The target user of ARC is an analyst working in close collaboration with the planning team.  The analyst would facilitate the team’s interactive use of ARC, including refinement of targets and imposition of new constraints to address stakeholder comments or concerns, and to explore tradeoffs.

Alternatives found with ARC are intended to serve as effective starting points for further analysis and refinement, including with other NIST-funded tools that include the Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning (CoE)-developed Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE) and, for more detailed economic comparison of resilience alternatives, NIST’s EDGe$ (Economic Decision Guide Software) Online Tool. 

ARC is distributed as a collection of Jupyter notebooks. Notebooks have been developed for riverine flooding, seismic, and tornado hazards. Currently available notebooks and instructions for their use are available at the landing pages below:

• ARC: Tornado https://doi.org/10.18434/mds2-3826 
• ARC: Seismic https://doi.org/10.18434/mds2-4291 

The landing pages include a README file with directions on installation and use in addition to links to peer-reviewed journal articles that explain the science underlying the tool.

See Highlights of NIST ARC, Version 0.98-Beta

• Flexible, platform-independent, tool that assists decision makers in identifying alternatives sets of resilience actions across the community
• Utilizes advanced optimization methods for efficient search for actions meeting resilience and cost goals
• Captures multiple forms of redundancy that are key to resilience
  • Multiple means of provisioning an input
  • Backup storage (e.g., water, fuel)
  • Portable capacity (e.g., mobile generators)
• Jointly addresses mitigation/preparedness and recovery
• Recovery modeling using critical path method (CPM)-like computations
• Includes well-developed, realistic case studies 
• Is informed by NIST studies and pre-deployments