Recovery of urban socio-technical systems after disaster: Reactive decision-making based planning under uncertainties of damage evaluation

The present work is devoted to the problem of the city recovery management after a large scale disaster. A modern city can be represented as a complex urban socio-technical system consisting of three interdependent parts: a physical lifeline system, citizens' daily life demand and service systems, the functioning of the last two directly depends on the connectivity of the physical lifelines. In cases, when all the consequences of a large scale disaster are known and the system damage can be evaluated withing high accuracy researches in the field of recovery of socio-technical systems mainly use different optimization methods of recovery plan generation using variouse objective functions. However, the recovery of urban socio-technical system in the case of the non-reliable information requires another approach. At the initial time moment collecting the information about the system's state can be hindered by many causes and possible cascading failures in the infrastructure system leads to the reassessment of the city damage. The aplicability of an optimization technique to the recovery management in such cases is rather doubtful. The process of recovery planning should be very adaptive to such changing conditions. We developed a method of recovery management based on the reactive decision-making. It uses the step-by-step realization logic which can be applied to the recovery management under significant information uncertainties. In the present paper the basic logic of this method is explained in detail and the dynamics of city recovery under information uncertainties is analysed.