The FRAMe (Flood Resilience Agent-Based Model) serves as a framework designed to simulate flood resilience dynamics at the community level, focusing on a rural settlement in the Mekong River Basin. Integrating empirical data from extensive surveys, Bayesian networks, and hydrological simulations, the framework quantifies resilience as a trade-off between robustness (resistance to damage) and adaptability (capacity for dynamic response). Agents include households, governments, and other actors, linked by social and governance networks that facilitate knowledge transfer, resource distribution, and risk communication. FRAMe incorporates mechanisms for flood forecasting, policy interventions (education, aid, insurance), and individual and collective decision-making, grounded in Protection Motivation Theory and MoHuB frameworks. The framework’s spatially explicit design leverages GIS data, which supports scenario testing of governance structures and stakeholder interactions. By examining policy scenarios and agent behavior, FRAMe aims to inform adaptive flood management strategies and enhance community resilience.

This model is intended to study the way information is collectively managed (i.e. shared, collected, processed, and stored) in a system and how it performs during a crisis or disaster. Performance is assessed in terms of the system’s ability to provide the information needed to the actors who need it when they need it. There are two main types of actors in the simulation, namely communities and professional responders. Their ability to exchange information is crucial to improve the system’s performance as each of them has direct access to only part of the information they need.

In a nutshell, the following occurs during a simulation. Due to a disaster, a series of randomly occurring disruptive events takes place. The actors in the simulation need to keep track of such events. Specifically, each event generates information needs for the different actors, which increases the information gaps (i.e. the “piles” of unaddressed information needs). In order to reduce the information gaps, the actors need to “discover” the pieces of information they need. The desired behavior or performance of the system is to keep the information gaps as low as possible, which is to address as many information needs as possible as they occur.

This simulation is of the 2003 Station Nightclub Fire and is part of the Interdependencies in Community Resilience (ICoR) project (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~eltawil/icor.html). The git contains the simulation as well as csvs of data about the fire, smoke, building, and people involved.