Hampton Roads, VA
Convergence, Inventory, Matching, and Assignment (CIMA) to Optimize Post-event Housing Repair for Displaced Vulnerable Populations
Organization: Old Dominion Research Foundation
Primary Investigator: Joshua Behr
Research Track: Climate & Environmental Resilience
Severe weather events have the potential to inflict wide-spread structural damage to homes, resulting in the displacement of populations. The length of time between initial displacement and returning, once again, to stable, functional housing varies greatly across populations with low-to-modest income households and medically fragile households tending to have lengthy displacements relative to non-vulnerable households. The matching of converging supply (donated materials and volunteer labor) with the need for repair of damaged homes among particularly vulnerable and medically fragile households is less than optimal. In response to this community-identified need, a partnership among the Hampton Roads Community Foundation, Old Dominion University, and local governments is developing the CIMA management platform to better connect available resources flowing into the region with these repair needs so that lengthy displacement times common among low-to-modest income households will be meaningfully reduced, thus addressing fundamental inequities in recovery and wellbeing.
NSF Abstract
Severe weather events have the potential to inflict wide-spread structural damage to homes, resulting in population displacement. Displaced households suffer enormously. The length of time between initial displacement and returning, once again, to stable housing varies greatly across populations, with low-to-moderate income households and medically fragile households tending to have lengthy displacements. Following an event, volunteer labor and donated materials flow into the impacted region. However, the matching of supply (donated materials and volunteer labor) with the need for repair among particularly vulnerable households is less than optimal. It is essential to more-optimally match supply with the need so that lengthy displacement times common among vulnerable households will be meaningfully reduced, thus addressing fundamental inequities in recovery and wellbeing. This project will develop, pilot, and field the Convergence, Inventory, Matching, and Assignment (CIMA) platform to provide this needed capability. CIMA, when used by nonprofit recovery organizations, will increase efficiency in matching supply with need and promises to meaningfully decrease displacement times among vulnerable households. The project will have multiple societal impacts. It will (a) lessen disparities in displacement times and, by extension, lessen longer-term disparities in health and wellbeing; (b) advance equity and justice issues in recovery; (c) partner with underserved communities; and (d) support the training of graduate students inclusive of racial and ethnic minorities and females.
This project will progress through high-level conceptual, implementation, and execution stages. More precisely, the CIMA architecture is a decentralized, stateless system conforming with Representational State Transfer (REST) in the creation of the underlying client/server protocols and Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs). The CIMA development and fielding processes shall (a) advance research in optimization and scheduling algorithms; (b) improve user experience interfaces consistent with user needs and expectations; (c) perform internal and external validation; and (d) stress test CIMA against common storm assumptions as well as outlier scenarios.
This project is part of the joint CIVIC Innovation Challenge program which includes Department of Energy Vehicle Technology Office, Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Science Foundation.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.