Christopher Zobel

​​​​​​12:00 April 24 2023 in GL-122

Title:  An Approach for Quantitatively Representing Multi-Dimensional Disaster Resilience Behavior

Abstract: The ability to compare the resilience of complex human systems to different types of disasters can provide support for assessing their inherent vulnerabilities and taking appropriate actions to strengthen them. Resilient behavior is complicated and multi-dimensional, however, and resilience can actually be exhibited in a number of different ways in practice. With this complexity in mind, this presentation discusses a multi-dimensional indicator for representing the resilience behavior of a complex human system, and it explores an approach for visualizing and analyzing the relationships between different resilience dimensions. The discussion also considers the issue of differentially weighting the various dimensions and the impact that this can have on the relative ranking of different scenarios. The approach is illustrated by analyzing an empirical data set for the New York metropolitan area, with respect to seven different natural disasters between 2010 and 2012.

Speaker Bio: Christopher W. Zobel is the R.B. Pamplin Professor of Business Information Technology in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. Dr. Zobel is one of the founding faculty members of the NSF NRT graduate program on Disaster Resilience and Risk Management, and he has served as an officer in the ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) Association, the POMS (Production and Operations Management Society) College of Humanitarian Operations and Crisis Management, and the INFORMS PSOR (Public Service Operations Research) Section. His primary research interests include disaster operations management and humanitarian supply chain resilience, and much of his work takes an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving. He has published over 100 articles in archival journals and academic conference proceedings, including the Journal of Operations Management, Production and Operations Management, Risk Analysis, Decision Sciences, and the European Journal of Operational Research. Dr. Zobel has been a Co-PI on several U.S. National Science Foundation grants that involve characterizing and quantifying multi-dimensional disaster resilience.
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