Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-15-2026

Department

Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering

Abstract

Coastal communities face escalating threats from hurricanes, necessitating a shift from descriptive risk assessment to prescriptive, optimized portfolio planning to enhance resilience. This study introduces an integrated decision-support framework that couples high-fidelity, multi-hazard socio-physical system modeling with a multi-objective optimization model. The framework quantifies the cascading impacts of hurricane-induced wind, storm surge, and waves on a community’s interdependent buildings, transportation network, and detailed distribution-level electric power network (EPN), along with the resulting population dislocation and long-term recovery. It then identifies Pareto-optimal portfolios of mitigation strategies by simultaneously minimizing three conflicting objectives—economic loss, population dislocation, and recovery time—under various budget constraints. The framework is applied to a case study of Galveston Island, Texas, under a representative 100-year hurricane scenario. Results demonstrate that the framework can reveal the inherent trade-offs between protecting property value versus minimizing social disruption and identify retrofitting strategies associated with them. A post-processing analysis using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model and social equity metrics further reveals that while optimized mitigation provides system-wide economic co-benefits, improvements in social equity are not guaranteed and require explicit consideration. By translating complex simulation outputs into a portfolio of actionable, resource-efficient strategies, this work provides a powerful tool for stakeholders to make informed, priority-driven investments to enhance coastal community resilience.

Publisher's Statement

© 2026 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2026.106136 

Publication Title

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

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