POSE: Phase I: Establishing an Open-Source Ecosystem for the Interdisciplinary Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE)

This project is funded by Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) which seeks to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance. Community infrastructure includes housing structures, electrical power, water and wastewater, transportation, and communication networks - all systems on which the economic and social well-being of any community depend.

These systems are susceptible to damage due to natural hazards, such as hurricanes and floods, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, and tsunamis. In additional to economic losses, damage to a community’s physical infrastructure has been shown to have a significant impact on its social systems. Community resilience planning encompasses the community’s preparedness, response to and recovery from a damaging event.

Enhancing community resilience remains a national imperative as reflected in recent significant financial investments in resilience enhancement at federal, state, and local levels and progress in disaster-related science and technology. IN-CORE is an open-source, comprehensive environment that can model a community across its physical, social, and economic systems.

The project includes the complex interdependencies within and across various infrastructure systems. The need to adapt, mitigate, and improve these systems has become critical as the natural disasters increase. The proposed open-source ecosystem (OSE) project for IN-CORE will result in a rapid acceleration and adoption of the science of resilience modeling by harnessing the power and breadth of open-source.

Researchers will be able to examine undiscovered and indirect interdependencies of the physical, social, and economic systems within a community using scientific algorithms and interdependencies. The datasets provided by the ecosystem can be used for validation and verification of new models and implementations. Finally, the de facto ontology and standards for resilience research will be formed by the ecosystem.

The project’s impacts include the development of science-based, validated tools that are needed to make risk- and resilience-informed policy decisions. These tools include the ability to quantify the effects of policy decisions at the community level, and on the population and local economy over time. This ability to perform “what if” scenarios for long-term quantitative planning will be enabled by this OSE project.

In this NSF POSE Phase I project the team will begin by hosting focus group meetings among project participants and key stakeholders to operationalize metrics for success and engage in community building. The founding open-source ecosystem (OSE) committee will partner with a consulting resource to identify appropriate organizational and governance models with continued engagement throughout the project.

Project activities will culminate with a final refinement of the governance structure and identification of methods for scaling the OSE. IN-CORE models are open source-driven and improvement/additions in these models will enable broader impacts in both research and graduate education. Specifically, the ability for students to utilize IN-CORE as the computational environment for their theses and dissertations, investigators to write proposals and complete research projects, and enable training of IN-CORE users who can serve as consultants.

The IN-CORE ecosystem requires review and validation of science related to community resilience and thus while the code contribution may be of very good quality and good functionality, the scientific contribution must also be fully validated by the contributor. Secondly, the data contribution to ecosystems is very important, and therefore IP management for data is as equally important as the software IP.

However, we recognize that a rigorous review process could hinder contributions to the ecosystem. Therefore, the IN-CORE OSE will consider how to maintain the scientific quality/validation of the contributions while encouraging the contributions. This Phase I POSE project is an ideal setting to balance these complex and conflicting needs for the IN-CORE OSE.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.