Next-Gen Community Resilience Modeling
Project IN-CORE and its partners provide support and services based on the IN-CORE platform (Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment), which is a state-of-the-art cloud platform that models the interconnected impacts of natural hazards to help communities make science-informed planning and policy decisions to lessen the impacts of hazards and enhance community resilience.
The IN-CORE platform allows scientific and community users to model the effects of natural hazards on the built environment, economy, and its people, social institutions, and households with fully integrated databases and structures. IN-CORE enables modeling of interdependent recovery and ultimately the ability to compare different policy options across an entire community model, thereby empowering communities to make informed resilience decisions. IN-CORE also tracks a core set of metrics (or user-defined metrics) that have been shown to correlate with resilient communities.
Models provide insights into the recovery and resilience of critical infrastructures and multiple community dependencies. Systems that are essential for recovery and vital to community life are integrated and interconnected in IN-CORE hazard scenarios: housing and shelter, water, power, healthcare delivery, social supports, government functions and communications, education, public administration, local and regional economies, and more.
IN-CORE maps a communities’ individual households, its populations demographics, and income levels. Models can anticipate population dislocation down to the household-level, as well as changes to income during the immediate aftermath of natural hazards and during the recovery process. Additionally, models can depict disruptions to employment by industry-type, individual businesses, and by location.
IN-CORE has unique capabilities to support equity by optimizing recovery and resilience for under-resourced populations and areas. IN-CORE enables decision optimization related to equity by linking these areas with infrastructure, housing, and household income to identify the most effective interventions that promote equity.
IN-CORE is an open-source computational modeling environment for community resilience. It enables users to model communities, various natural hazard scenarios and their interconnected impacts, and investigate alternative policies to enhance community resilience. IN-CORE has the capability of analyzing and assessing resilience of community components at the user-defined, community level. The IN-CORE platform is publicly available and includes pyIncore (a Python library of community resilience), IN-CORE Lab (a customized Jupyter Lab with pyIncore installed and hosted on a cloud system at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). With a free IN-CORE account, users can develop, run, or test models of their community in their own workspace. Visit the NCSA’s IN-CORE site for more information about IN-CORE accounts, using IN-CORE, and tutorials.
To Register for an IN-CORE Account
To use IN-CORE directly, IN-CORE service requires a user account provided and operated by the NCSA identity management system. Registering for an account is free and open to everyone. This account gives you access to all of the public data available within IN-CORE and allows you to create models that are only accessible by you. If applicable, it is recommended that you sign up with your institutional email. To create an IN-CORE account, please visit the NCSA’s registration page.
Services and Research with IN-CORE
Project IN-CORE is a non-profit organization that is available to provide technical support and consultation services for community resilience planning, assisting with data outputs for populating FEMA Building Resilient Infrastructure Communities (BRIC) Grants applications and other grant opportunities, providing technical assistance for resilience in Community Disaster Resilience Zone (CDRZ) designated communities, and providing examples of planning tools such as National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Playbook and how it links with IN-CORE. Additionally, Project IN-CORE can provide technical support for researchers interested in using IN-CORE for research and for contributing to new developments to the IN-CORE platform.
For more information on IN-CORE and services available to your community or for research, please fill out the form on our Contact Us page.
History
IN-CORE was developed by the NIST-funded Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning. In 2015, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) funded the Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning (CoE), a 14 university-based consortium of almost 100 collaborators, including faculty, students, post-doctoral scholars, and NIST researchers. The Interdisciplinary Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE) is the ultimate product (an open source computational decision support platform) which is based on a sound scientific theory and empirical evidence. An important aspect of IN-CORE is the characterization of uncertainty and its propagation throughout the chained models of the platform.
IN-CORE provides communities with interdependent models of an entire community, along with data-driven social science household and business models and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, that predict the level and distributional economic effects of a natural hazard on the community economy. To learn more about the Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning, visit the Center of Excellence website. Project In-Core is a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives.