Complex Networks for Computational Urban Resilience (CONCUR)

CONCUR develops a computational framework for assessing and characterizing urban environments stability or fragility in response to volatility and stress, identifying specific weaknesses as well as key tipping points which could lead to rapid systemic failure. CONCUR explicitly models urban environments as emergent complex systems, focusing attention on the critical triggers that could lead to rapid transformations from robust to fragile. CONCUR ingests both social media and archival data using an already developed tool, identifying key indicators of urban functions and potential disruptors. CONCUR quantifies these indicators importance to the environments stability and incorporates them into a conceptual ontology, characterizing the urban terrains ability to maintain stability and provide civil services and governance. CONCUR weighs the impact that these indicators and their causal inter-linkages have upon each other across time, and produces a resilience score, characterizing the urban environments fragility and forecasting its likelihood to become feral. CONCUR uses cutting-edge analytics to identify specific weaknesses in infrastructure and services and to identify emerging tipping points that could lead to instability and rapid system failure. CONCUR provides users both quantitative analytics as well as intuitive visualizations through an already developed insight-generating interface.