Restimate: Recovery Estimation Tool for Resilience Planning

Abstract

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the Community Resilience Planning Guide in 2016. The NIST Guide advocates for a participatory process for developing a performance measurement framework for the jurisdiction's resilience against a scenario hazard. The framework centers around tables of expected and desired recovery times for selected community assets, such as electricity, water, and natural gas infrastructures. The NIST Guide does not provide a method for estimating the expected recovery times. However, building high-fidelity computer models for such estimations requires substantial resources that even larger jurisdictions cannot cost-justify. The most promising approach to recovery time estimation is to systematically use data elicited from people to tap into the wisdom of the (knowledgeable) crowd. This paper describes a novel research-through-design project to enable the computer-supported elicitation of recovery time series data. This work is the first in the literature to examine people's ability to estimate recovery curves and how design influences such estimations. Its main contribution to resilience planning is three-fold: development of a new elicitation tool called Restimate, understanding its potential user base, and providing insights into how it can facilitate resilience planning. Restimate is the first tool to enable evidence-based expert elicitation in any community with limited resources for resilience planning. Beyond resilience planning, those who facilitate high-stakes planning activities under large uncertainties (e.g., mission-critical system design and planning) will benefit from a similar research-through-design process.