ABSTRACT
The tremendous socio-economic impact from natural disasters in recent years, e.g. the Wenchuan Earthquake (2008) and Super Typhoon Lekima (2019), attracts broad attention from government agencies, researchers, and practitioners on how to reconstruct communities, specifically their damaged building portfolios (consist more than 90% of the infrastructure system) after a disaster to achieve higher performance level in future hazards in a rational way. The rebuilding philosophy of Building Back Better emphasis that a community should achieve a higher performance level in future hazard events by implementing a well-designed reconstruction strategy. This study introduces how to realize Building Back Better by a rebuilding decision framework under the umbrella of portfolio level life-cycle analysis and community resilience. It firstly extends the concept of life-cycle analysis from a single building to the building portfolio, and quantifies the impact of certain reconstruction decision over the entire life-cycle of the building portfolio in terms of expected building portfolio life-cycle cost and expected building portfolio cumulative prospect value. Notably, in the latter methodology, the non-linear probability perception of typically risk-aversion decision-makers can be addressed that the contribution of low-probability/high-consequence events is amplified. Further, it incorporates the resilience goal in portfolio level to ensure limited functionality loss and quick recovery from extreme events in the future. The proposed post-hazard portfolio level life-cycle analysis and reconstruction decision framework can be directly applied to the reconstruction practice that could support Building Back Better, and help communities finally achieve pre-defined resilience goals in the most efficient way.
