Join us in welcoming the OR Program’s own faculty member, Ben Rachunok, as he shares his research linking stainability and resilience.
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Applying Operations Research Methods to Link Sustainability and Resilience
Resilience is often conceptualized as the ability for socio-ecological systems to bounce back after disturbance. Resilience with sustainability is a relatively new idea conceptualized as bouncing forward to better (more just and sustainable) future states of environmental, social, and economic conditions. Operationalizing the idea of sustainability with resilience has thus far been challenging owing to the numerous ways that communities and systems change in the face of natural hazards and climate change. This talk will first provide an overview of the importance of operationalizing sustainability and resilience together and will then present two methods aiming to bridge this gap. The first is a series of data processing steps to extract disaster-related information from social media data, the second will describe Contrastive Community Networks (CCNs), a method for quantifying how sustainable resilience after disruptions based on unsupervised clustering techniques. I will show through a case study how CCNs can be used to identify risk factors within a community that catalyze or inhibit sustainable resilience, and contrast this with current, recovery-focused resilience methods.
Ben Rachunok is Assistant Professor in the Industrial & Systems Department of North Carolina State University. Prior to joining NC State he was a postdoc in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University, and was a fellow of the 2021 cohort of the Rising Environmental Leaders Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Ben was formerly an R&D Intern at the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Labs. He received his BS in Industrial & Systems Engineering from North Carolina State University, and holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University. He is a member of INFORMS, IISE and is a council member in Society for Risk Analysis.
