CI-STR: A capabilities-based interface to model socio-technical systems in disaster resilience assessment.

This paper presents a Capabilities-based Interface for Socio-Technical Resilience (CI-STR) framework to model community disaster resilience, a process shaped by the complex interplay between social and technical factors. Central to this framework is the concept of human capabilities, defined as the opportunities for individuals to achieve valuable functionings. These capabilities serve as the interface that integrates individuals' social characteristics with community resources provided by infrastructure systems and businesses, both of which can undergo dramatic and rapid changes after a disaster, influencing the fulfillment of capabilities. The CI-STR framework highlights the feedback relationships among individual capabilities, where one capability can affect others through its impact on social and/or technical contexts throughout the post-disaster recovery process. In the social context, changes in capabilities directly reflect on individual's physical, financial, and social conditions, while technical feedback effects can alter the demand, supply, and operation of technical systems. The framework conceptualizes the recovery process as a series of activities driven by human capabilities and introduces three key features to model this dynamic process: capabilities-induced coping strategies, time-dependent and hierarchical capabilities, and capabilities in groups. These features capture the motivations and abilities for recovery activities, prioritize actions based on urgent needs, and assess group-level capabilities, providing unique insights into the temporal evolution of individuals' capabilities during recovery. The CI-STR framework enables comprehensive modeling of the human components and their interactions with technical and social elements, facilitating the assessment of community resilience and the development of recovery strategies across a wide range of community dimensions. • Modeling of dynamic socio-technical interactions in disaster resilience. • CI-STR integrates social and technical elements to fulfil human capabilities. • Capabilities contribute back to social and technical contexts via feedback loops. • CI-STR features the time evolution of capabilities during recovery. • A schematic procedure for implementing CI-STR is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]