The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering welcomes Abigail Beck for a special guest presentation. UW students, faculty, and staff are welcome to attend.

Equity-Based Infrastructure Decision Support for Improved Community Resilience

Infrastructure provides critical services to a community and its provision or absence greatly dictates a community’s impacts, functionality, and resilience post hazard. However, the impacts of infrastructure failures after hazards are not felt uniformly across a community but are often disproportionately clustered among vulnerable populations (e.g., minority, low-income) who are also often serviced by infrastructure more prone to failures only to exacerbate the likelihood of disproportionate impacts. Community resilience necessitates the holistic support of an entire community. If equity considerations, such as reducing these inequitable impacts, are not integrated into infrastructure design decisions (e.g., retrofit, restoration) then infrastructure is not equitably serving a community nor is community resilience best improved. This talk presents novel equity-based infrastructure decision support tools for improved community resilience. 

Equity is not easily defined but is best viewed as being defined by five dimensions each with their own definition: recognitional, distributional, restorative, transgenerational, and procedural. The primary focus of this talk will be on two dimensions. I will first elucidate an innovative infrastructure outage impact criticality analysis that enables the assessment of infrastructure components from a social impact perspective in support of recognitional equity. The framework is built upon the integration of a network analysis approach with social impact models. Secondly, I will present an equity retrofit metric to quantify the inequity in service provision to vulnerable population subsets in support of restorative equity. The metric is derived upon Theil’s T and supplemented with network reliability quantifications for the infrastructure application. I will conclude with a discussion of future investigations to further support the integration of equity into the infrastructure decision-making paradigm. By working to incorporate these equity dimensions into infrastructure decision-making, the most vulnerable will be better supported to ultimately improve a community’s overall resilience.

Abigail (Abby) Beck is a Ph.D. candidate in Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her M.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2020 and her B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2019. She is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a 2023-2024 Mavis Future Faculty Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is a member of the NIST Center of Excellence for Community Resilience and collaborates with engineers, economics, social scientists, and planners on the development of tools to support community resilience decision-making. She has been recognized for her research at multiple international conferences with a Student Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR) in 2022 and the Civil Engineering Risk and Reliability Association (CERRA) Student Recognition Award at the International Conference on Application of Statistics and Probability in Civil Engineering (ICASP) in 2023. Her current research surrounds equity-considered infrastructure decision-making for improved community resilience to natural hazards. She approaches civil engineering from a socially conscious perspective and integrates her fundamental specialization in structural reliability, risk-based decision-making, systems modeling, and probabilistic methods with social science approaches. Through her career she plans to help usher engineering’s shift from a purely life-safety design mindset to one that is resilience and equity oriented. She is actively supporting this mission by serving as the secretary for the Structural Engineering Institute’s (SEI) Resilience Committee. Her socially conscious approach to engineering also influences her teaching and mentoring. She is currently working to advance equity’s incorporation in the engineering curriculum through the development of a game-based learning module. She also serves the university and greater community as the Vice Chair of CEE Graduate Student Advisory Committee, Co-External Partnership Coordinator for Illinois GradSWE, and Student Director on the McKinley Foundation Board.