Life Cycle Approach for Facility Resilience Information Modeling (FRIM)

Disasters have affected more than 3 billion people, killed over 750,000 people, and cost more than $600 billion over the past three years in the US. Research efforts have been made in the domain of community resilience attempting to mitigate disaster impacts at a community level. However, inadequate attention was drawn from researchers to the area of disaster resilience at a facility level. In fact, facility resilience plays a significant role because most of social activities take place in such built facilities.Facility spaces are dynamic in aspects of time and space for its users, including both facility occupants and its operation staffs. Extreme events also interrupt normal operations of a facility. In current practice, a comprehensive facilities information model is missing to monitor and predict the resilience capacity of a facility, and to coordinate disaster response and recovery during and after a crisis.In this research, the authors present the theoretical framework of facility resilience information modelling using a life cycle approach. An object-based data structure was designed and presented to integrate workspace representation into facilities management models, and a workspace identification and adjustment method was created to facilitate the modelling and planning of resilience operation spaces. This solves the current challenges in facility resilience including the delay in accessing facility information during disaster response, and extra losses of time and money caused by lack of accurate facility information from the available facility information systems. The final product, the Facility Resilience Information Model (FRIM), will improve facility resilience by providing the facility management team more approachable and accurate facility information, engaging facility occupants in crisis assessment and responding, and laying a foundation to achieve occupant-centered facility resilience management.