PEOPLES: A Tool to Measure Community Resilience

This paper provides a novel method to quantitatively assess the resilience of communities at various scales. The proposed method is based on the PEOPLES framework and it takes an indicator-based approach as an engine for its algorithm. PEOPLES is a framework for identifying the different resilience aspects of a community and for providing new ways through which the decision makers can take actions. The framework comprises seven dimensions, each of which is the collection of more specific components and indicators. Each indicator is accompanied with a measure allowing the analytical computation of the indicator's performance. The measures are presented in the form of continuous functions whose parameters can be analytically obtained. The output of the methodology is a performance function for each indicator and a resilience index for the whole community. A case study illustrating the application of the methodology is also provided in the paper.