Commercial Building Recovery Methodology for Use in Community Resilience Modeling

Commercial businesses in an area affected by a natural hazard can have significant interruption and disruption because of damage and impeding factors including financing delays. The recovery of commercial buildings is a necessary but not solely sufficient condition for owners to reopen their businesses. At the community-level modeling scale for planning, the ability to model commercial recovery across the entire community, including short-term business operation disruption, is critical to understanding the interdependent recovery across engineering, economics, and social science. This study proposes a probabilistic commercial building recovery model to predict the recovery of commercial buildings over time following a hazard event and considers two critical types of downtime: (1) impeding factors such as financing delays, and (2) the repair process. A typical recovery resource portfolio available to business owners was developed and quantitatively incorporated into the proposed probabilistic commercial building recovery model. The ability to model commercial building recovery will inform decision makers of the entire recovery process for upcoming business recovery and community resilience metrics related to physical services stability, thereby improving community resilience planning.