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Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
Hurricanes and Power System
Reliability—The Effects of
Individual Decisions and
System-Level Hardening
By A l l ison C. R ei l ly, G i na L. Ton n , C h e ng w ei Z h a i ,
ABSTRACT  |  Hurricanes produce significant, widespread,
and often prolonged electrical-power outages. For example,
Hurricane Irene caused more than 500 000 Long Island Power
Authority customers to lose power and it took eight days to
achieve 99% customer restoration. Individuals and businesses
are heavily dependent on a continuous supply of electricity. Given
this strong dependence on reliable electricity, individuals and
private industries are increasingly putting collective pressure
on regulators to require system hardening by utilities. In some
cases, this has led to utility action. Conversely, many customers
install a backup generator to guarantee electricity supply during
disruptive events. These actions taken by individual customers
affect their experiences in future storms, and are generally
influenced by individuals' strength of preference for reliable
power, their beliefs about the likelihood of losing power in the
future, and the outcomes of their most recent experiences.
However, individual action may come at the expense of collective
action, whereby those who buy generators, often those with
more resources available to purchase the generator, do not
participate in the collective grievance, reducing the demand for
overall system hardening. By using a validated power-outage
forecasting model in conjunction with an agent-based model, we
Manuscript received September 21, 2016; revised January 5, 2017; accepted
February 22, 2017. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF)
under Grants 1621116 and 1631409. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommenda-
tions presented in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the
view of NSF. (Corresponding author: Seth D. Guikema.)
A. C. Reilly was with the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA. She is now with the Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park,
MD 20742 USA (e-mail: areilly2@umd.edu)
G. L. Tonn was with the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering,
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 USA. She is now with the Risk
Center at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA
(e-mail: gtonn@wharton.upenn.edu)
C. Zhai and S. D. Guikema are with the Department of Industrial and Operations
Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA (e-mail: sguikema@
umich.edu; cwzhai@umich.edu).
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/JPROC.2017.2689720
0018-9219 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
and S e t h D. G u i k e m a
characterize how a community's likelihood of losing power in
repeated hurricanes is affected by the complex interactions
among individuals' behavioral responses in whether to
engage in personal or collective action.
Agent-based model; behavioral response;
KEYWORDS  | 
electric-power outage
I.   I N T RODUC T ION
Business and household consumers of electric power
are increasingly reliant on a constant flow of electricity
even following severe hazards such as hurricanes and
ice storms. In a recent study, 62% of respondents say
compensation of $500 would not suffice for a two-day
outage [1]. This expectation of uninterrupted service is
expected to continue as facets of the transportation and
heating infrastructure are added to the grid to utilize
decarbonized energy [2]. Despite this, not all service pro-
viders offer similar levels of reliability following these
hazards. The prevailing wisdom assumes that differences
among utilities’ performance stem from either the unique
characteristics of the recent hazard or managerial differ-
ences that guide system-wide hardening and restoration
decisions [3], [4]. While these are likely significant fac-
tors, it does not fully explain differences among utilities
operated by the same electric-holding company, differ-
ences between adjacent utilities, and differences within
a service area. For example, adjacent utilities, which
presumably experience many similar hazards due to spa-
tial proximity, can have vastly different SAIFI and SAIDI
index values when major events are considered [5].
This paper focuses on how factors other than mana-
gerial-driven decisions and unique aspects of the hazards
may affect the reliability of utilities. Specifically, this
Proceedings of the IEEE   1
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Reilly et al . : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
paper explores impacts from hurricanes and how customer
expectation of reliable power and behavioral response to
sustained outages may create a dynamic feedback loop that
forces change and affects the overall reliability. This study is
limited to customers either purchasing a generator or filing
a complaint, with the latter being an effective strategy for
system improvement should a sufficient number of people
complain. It is possible that customers do both, though it
is more likely that customers with generators do not file a
complaint and thereby reduce the demand for system hard-
ening now and in the future. In this paper, system harden-
ing is assumed to be the process whereby an electric-power
utility makes an investment in the system to reduce its vul-
nerability to damage in future events. This could include
measures such as raising substations, undergrounding lines,
and replacing poles with ones that can withstand greater
wind loading.
The hazard explored in this paper is hurricanes, for two
reasons. The first is because they can cause widespread and
prolonged outages. Hurricane Sandy1 caused more than
8 million outages and nearly 10% of those outages persisted
for more than one week [6]. Sustained outages directly
attributed to at least nine deaths for reasons including car-
bon monoxide poisoning, falls due to darkness, and inopera-
ble oxygen machines [7]. Generators were sold out and some
utilities were required to invest heavily in hardening after-
ward. The second reason is more banal. Models that forecast
localized hazards generated by hurricanes (e.g., wind speed)
are sufficiently advanced to characterize the risk of an out-
age in a localized region (e.g., census-tract level). While
hurricanes are the focus of this work, the methodology and
insights could also be applied to other wide-scale spatial dis-
asters, such as ice storms, as the methodology continues to
advance [8].
The objective of this work is to close a feedback loop in
electric-power utility system reliability modeling by incorpo-
rating customer behavioral response. To the authors’ knowl-
edge, this is the first work to do so. This is done through an
integrated power-outage-prediction and agent-based model
that uses a probabilistically consistent synthetic hurricane
generation model to create a tunable hurricane environ-
ment. The hypothesis is that seemingly minor adjustments
to how customers respond and their tolerances to outages
may aggregate to system-wide changes that affect regional
power reliability. Through this, the research explores how
different trajectories of power system reliability may emerge
over time.
The model presented in this paper is quantitative, and
its structure is heavily informed by social science studies of
behavioral responses to natural hazards. The model high-
lights the value of interdisciplinary work by bringing new
1
The name “Hurricane Sandy” is used throughout this paper. The
storm merged with a nontropical system, and its proper name is subject
to debate.
2  Proceedings of the IEEE
understanding and perspective. As such, the paper contrib-
utes to the literature in the following ways: 1) it provides an
alternative explanation for regional disparities in power sys-
tem reliability; 2) it develops an integrated model for com-
bining both outage forecasting and behavioral responses;
3) it tests the implications of climate change scenarios and
policy interventions on grid reliability; 4) it builds a realistic
case study using open-source parcel data from over 357 000
State of Maryland electric-power customers; and last, 5) it
demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary modeling.
The paper is organized as follows. The next section
provides an overview of relevant literature, including a
discussion of the relevance of behavioral response to haz-
ards, outage forecast modeling, and agent-based modeling.
Section III presents the methodology, and a case study is
provided in section IV. The fifth section concludes with
insights, limitations, and next steps.
II.  L I T ER AT U R E
The model presented in Section III is grounded in an agent-
based simulation that integrates components of both out-
ages forecasting and behavioral response.
A. Electric-Power Outage Modeling
Knowing the likely extent of outages in the hours and
days prior to a hurricane provides a significant advantage
to those overseeing emergency response and recovery. It
guides decision makers on where to open shelters and utili-
ties on where to preposition mobile assets so power can
promptly be restored, along with a host of other benefits.
As such, there has been a significant push toward a priori
prediction of electric-power outages in advance of a disas-
ter. Typically, the predictions are updated when the hurri-
cane tracks are updated, which typically happens every six
hours. The two general approaches are: network models
and predictive statistical and data modeling. The first uses
topographical or network flow models with sets of supply
and demand nodes to predict which nodes will have unmet
demand when nodes or links are removed [9]–[11]. For
reasons particularly linked to model size, scaling, and data
requirements, this type of modeling tends to be at the trans-
mission level. Fortunately, transmission lines tend to fare
well during hurricanes whereas components at the distribu-
tion level tend to fail and cause the vast majority of outages.
Statistical approaches and data mining methods for pre-
dicting outages have made significant advances in the past
decade and, with sufficient training data, they can offer esti-
mates that are more spatially detailed than those described
above [12]. Liu et al. developed the first statistical outage
prediction model using generalized linear models along
with the hurricane’s track to estimate outages [13], [14].
However, the model was evaluated based on fit and not pre-
dictive accuracy, in part because some covariates were hur-
ricane specific indicator variables. Han et al. developed and
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validated a predictive outage forecasting model that relied
on a bevy of utility-specific spatial information [15], [16].
Unfortunately, much of these data are not widely available,
reducing the model’s direct applicability for other utilities
and regions. Nateghi et al. expanded upon these methods
by comparing them to the predictive performance of other
regressing and data mining methods [12]. This work demon-
strated how flexible ensemble-based statistical models offer
superior predictive accuracy. Quiring et al. used classifica-
tion and regression trees to evaluate the role of soil moisture
and land cover in outage modeling [17]. These studies later
informed Nateghi et al. and Guikema et al. which showed
that strong predictive accuracy could be achieved by using
a random forest model and only public data that are avail-
able in advance of an approaching storm [18], [19]. These
prediction models have been validated using extensive out-
of-sample testing and Guikema et al. is used to estimate the
likelihood of power outages at a census tract level in the
model present in Section III [19].
B. Downstream Effects of Electric-Power Outages
Historically, the research on the impacts of sustained
outages focused on cost. Wacker and Billinton reviewed dif-
ferent methodologies for assessing cost of interruption for
electric-power customers [21]. They conclude that despite
reasonable methodologies being available, insufficient data
prevent accurate estimates. Essentially, too few regions have
experienced prolonged, repeated outage events and the cost
depends on many factors, including location and demograph-
ics. Since 1989, however, there has been a tenfold increase
in the number of major outage events—defined as having
50 000+ customers without power—in the United States,
providing significantly more data [22]. More recently, the
interruption cost modeling has focused on improved local-
ized, temporal, and sector-specific estimates [23]–[26].
While interruption costs and willingness to pay are good
indicators for the impacts of outages, the range of effects
is much wider. From a critical services perspective, the loss
of power for a dependent infrastructure system (e.g., tele-
communications) can set a cascade of failures into motion,
leaving customers both without power and other critical ser-
vices [27], [28]. Only recently, however, has the research
perspective on the impacts of outages been broadened to
consider human welfare, coping, and behavioral response,
though its study is still nascent and geographically limited.
Researchers have repeatedly shown that how individuals
respond to a hazard affects the regional risk landscape under
similar events in the future [29]–[31]. Responses can be
complex and range from doing nothing to moving out of the
hazard zone, and everything in between. That which moti-
vates these responses is perhaps even more complex, though
outside the scope of this paper [32], [33]. Generally, when
individuals perceive a high likelihood of large consequences,
they are more likely to mitigate or demand information on
Reilly et al. : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
how to prepare for the next event [34]. Severe consequences
from some hazards have emboldened citizens to unite their
grievances and either demand corrective action from regu-
lators or undertake wide-scale mitigation measures them-
selves. For example, Neef et al. [35] present a case study of
farmers in flood-prone North Thailand who united in wid-
ening the local riverbed to reduce the likelihood of severe
flooding in the future. In a separate case, numerous denials
of flood insurance claims led many Hurricane Sandy victims
to complain to reporters and congressional representatives.
The federal investigation that resulted highlighted a myriad
of problems facing the Federal Flood Insurance Program
and may be a step toward changing how individuals are
insured for floods in the United States [36]. These examples
highlight why studying a system in isolation without consid-
ering how humans may intervene and alter the system may
underestimate or overestimate the risk.
A power outage may induce a variety of behavioral
responses. Some people may do nothing, either because the
outage does not bother them, or because they do not have the
ability to do anything [2]. Those who perceive the likelihood
of outages to be high in the future may purchase generators
depending on affordability. General trends in generator
ownership are unknown and likely geographically depend-
ent. One study grounded in interviews in rural United
Kingdom reported relatively few respondents using or pur-
chasing a generator [2]. This is consistent with other stud-
ies based in Scandinavia, which suggest residents in rural
regions are more likely to report that outages are expected
and manageable [37], [38]. Tendencies toward purchasing
generators may differ in the United States. 15% of homes
have either portable or standby generators, and the sales of
generators grew 45% in 2012—a year that witnessed over
120 major outage events [39]. Anecdotally, a run on gen-
erators is typically seen in the days before and after a hur-
ricane and a search in Google Trends for the term “personal
generator” was 20 times higher in the days after Hurricane
Sandy than the month prior. The actions of others in the
community may either encourage or discourage mitigation.
This phenomenon is consistently witnessed in the flooding
and other natural hazards literature [33], [40], and there is
little reason to believe it would not occur with generators.
The consensus is that by mitigating, an agent is implicitly
conveying information to their neighbors that their risk is
sufficiently high to take action [33]. This may induce others
to mitigate as well. On the other hand, an individual with a
generator may exert social altruism and become the beacon
for his or her neighborhood, with neighbors visiting to cook
food or power electrics [2]. The authors suppose that it may
create a free rider effect, in which neighbors are dissuaded
from purchasing generators themselves [41].
There is some evidence that collective action has forced
hardening of utilities. For example, based on complaints,
the American Customer Satisfaction Index ranked Pepco,
the regional electric-power supplier for Washington, DC
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Reilly et al . : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
and surrounding counties as the “most hated company in
America” in 2011—a feat given its relatively small customer
base compared to more national brands [42]. As a condition
for its 2016 merger with Exelon, Pepco must achieve aggres-
sive reliability targets by 2020 [43].
There is an inherent dichotomy between participating in
collective action and individual mitigation. That which one
chooses is many times aligned with whether one views miti-
gation as a personal or governmental responsibility [44].
When large-scale mitigation is conducted, individuals are
often deterred from mitigating locally [45]. The perception
is typically that their risk has been reduced. Those who do
mitigate individually, which can be expensive, are less likely
to participate in the collective action. When that occurs,
large-scale mitigation efforts to may be less likely to occur
and create risk disparities that are based on income [46].
Finally, it is possible that customers who experience an
outage request information about the situation. This has
been seen after other hazards [34]. Information dissemi-
nation by a community can affect residents’ perceptions
of risk as well as their perception of how they can manage
and mitigate risk on an individual level. Improved provision
of information can better prepare households for natural
hazard events [47]. A study by Ludy and Kondolf [48] indi-
cates that informed individuals are more likely to take pre-
ventative action than uninformed individuals. Information
sources and availability are prominent components of an
individual’s response to natural hazards, playing a part in
both the perception of risk and in the behavioral response
to risk [49]. The mechanism that spurs mitigation is more
complex and dependent on a host of factors.
Practically, an information campaign could inform resi-
dents of the closest shelters. This is especially necessary when
extreme heat or cold accompanies the storm. Alternatively,
an information campaign could inform residents on how
likely prolonged outages are and how to survive a sustained
outage. This is crucial in hard-to-access rural regions and
for customers reliant on power for life-sustaining machines.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no research
examining the effectiveness of information campaigns that
raise awareness of prolonged electric-power outages.
C. Agent-Based Modeling for Extreme Events
Agent-based models (ABMs) are simulation models that
include decision-making entities called agents in addition to
stochastic elements [50]–[52]. The agents are autonomous
and heterogeneous, and can have distinct learning rules,
behavioral rules, and history. The agents can interact with
each other and with their environment. ABMs are typically
used to explain rather than predict, and can be used to simu-
late the emergence of system-level properties [53], [54].
ABMs are particularly powerful in domains such as the one
present in the paper, ones that lack data sources and contain
complex social interactions [54]. Sensitivity analyses are
4  Proceedings of the IEEE
useful and important to understand the potential impacts
of uncertain model parameters and rules on ABM output.
ABMs have been used to simulate natural hazard
response, wherein individual behavior is a key driver of col-
lective outcomes. For instance, Dawson et al. developed an
ABM to simulate vulnerability to coastal flooding in light
of different storm surge conditions, evacuation strategies,
and flood warning times [55]. Chen et al. used agent-based
simulation to study hurricane evacuation in the Florida
Keys [56]. Other studies have also generated agent-based
simulations of urban and coastal evacuation under vary-
ing situations [57]–[59]. This study focuses on longer term
responses and mitigation action in reaction to hurricane
power outages.
The insights provided by ABMs, regardless of the topic,
must be qualified by the learning and behavioral assump-
tions employed. Modeling human behavior is challenging at
best because individuals have differing prior beliefs, experi-
ences, preferences, cognitive abilities, and so on. The goal of
capturing behavior is not to precisely mimic behavior or to
forecast how the system will act. Rather it is to understand
how the strength of assumptions, preferences, beliefs, etc.,
may inform the results and to identify traits that could lead
to superior outcomes. This can only be accomplished with
rigorous sensitivity analyses. From a policy perspective, this
could aid in identifying which aspects of behavior are most
important for some systems, and the direction that policy-
makers may want to “nudge” some individuals, and by how
much, to improve outcomes.
To that end, the authors have identified three general
classes of models that incorporate behavior in ABMs. The
first group are “perfect world” behavioral models. These
models are more prescriptive than they are descriptive and
indeed not likely to be empirically valid in any meaning-
ful way. As an example, Bayesian learning models, where
parameters that support a distribution are updated after
some experience, fall into this category (e.g., see [66]).
These are reasonable models, and in a “perfect world,” indi-
viduals would use their entire experience to parameterize
reasonable distributions over possible future events and
then act in their best interest. We know from observation
though that people do not always act in this manner, which
is why it is important to compare these “perfect world” mod-
els with more descriptive models, and then to measure the
implications of being wrong. An example of this approach is
provided in Section IV-B.
The second class of models are simple “if–then” models,
which make reasonable inferences about causes and effects
but do not attempt to characterize any underlying process.
This model type may be probabilistic. For example, “If the
power goes out, then I will buy a generator with a likelihood
of ​x%
​ .” This is then followed by rigorous sensitivity analyses.
These models are typically intuitive, or at least empirically
observed, and not subjected to validation per se. Despite
not being grounded in the most recent scientific advances
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Reilly et al. : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y

in behavioral modeling, trends still emerge which indicate

the relative importance of preferences. Berglund [54] and
Epstein [61] provide examples of this type of approach.
The final class of models is supported by recent significant
advances in behavioral sciences. This has resulted in numer-
ous frameworks for learning, behavior, and decision mak-
ing under uncertainty. Many have had elements validated
but none are (arguably) universally more valid than others.
This class of models tends to address more of the intricate
relationships between causes and effects and the limitations
of humans themselves. How one would accurately param-
eterize many of these models is up for debate, which dem-
onstrates, again, the importance of sensitivity analyses. All
of the classes are plausible depending on the problem, and
each has unique strengths and limitations. Aspects of all
model classes exist in the methodology that follows.

D. Alternative Approaches for Modeling Complex

Systems With Many Agents
Agent-based modeling is among the many mathematical
modeling methods for shedding light on complex systems,
especially in the arena of policy and resilience. Broadly,
the field can be divided into bottom-up approaches, which
include simulation and agent-based models discussed
above, and top-down approaches, which include optimiza-
tion, economic, and other methods. An advantage to simu-
lation methods is that unique behaviors can be assigned to
each agent. However, this behavioral assignment could be
imprecise, making sensitivity analysis crucial. Examples of
bottom-up simulation methods that quantify regional vul-
nerability and that are not explicitly agent-based models
include [62] and [63].
Top-down approaches typically assign the same reason-
able behavior to all agents (e.g., cost minimizers), in part to
add model tractability. These models may use optimization
to identify optimal strategies given some resilience or other
policy objectives (e.g., [64]and [65]). Performance and data
analysis methods, such as data envelopment analysis and
input–output models, are useful for evaluating high-level
impacts of policies (e.g., [4]and [66]). In many of these
models, agents can be fully strategic, meaning that they can
anticipate the effects of their choices on others (e.g., how
the decision to purchase insurance affects the insurance
market’s exposure [65], [67]). As we begin to more fully
understand human behavioral responses to risk, complex
system modeling will continue to advance.
III.   M ET HOD OL O GY
Fig. 1 provides an illustrative overview of the integrated
outage prediction and agent-based model. First, a library
of synthetic tracks is produced for the study area. Storms
are generated in the following manner. A starting location
and wind speed for a storm are randomly selected in propor-
tion to the historical spatial and wind speed distributions
Fig. 1. Model overview.
of storms at landfall, respectively. Track data from historic
storms are collected and used to train a random forest model
that predicts a storm’s movement in 6-h increments. This
predicts the storm’s path. The Kaplan and DeMaria hurri-
cane decay model is then employed to parametrically reduce
wind speeds for each 6-h increment [60]. Next, any storm
track that does not produce significant winds in the study
area (i.e., winds of tropical storm strength or below) is dis-
carded. This step concludes by using a parametric downs-
caling model that interpolates the 6-h hurricane track and
intensity into 3-s peak wind gusts for the centroid of each
census tract [68], [69]. These wind speeds are used to pre-
dict the fraction of customers to lose power and comprise
the synthetic hurricane library. In sum, 32 000 synthetic
hurricanes tracks are produced and range in intensity
between tropical storms and Category 5 storms in the
study area. Hurricanes are not chosen randomly from this
library but rather in proportion to the frequency and inten-
sity parameters set by the model later.
Using the historical storm data set, the peak wind
speed from each storm in the area is used to parameterize a
Weibull distribution. This distribution reflects the historical

Proceedings of the IEEE   5

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Reilly et al . : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
distribution of storm intensity in the study area. Additionally,
the mean number of historical storms to affect the study
region in a given year is used to parameterize a Poisson
distribution. This distribution is sampled to determine the
number of hurricanes to occur in a given year. While there
is tremendous uncertainty in how climate change will affect
hurricane frequency and intensity, the general consensus
is that they are likely to become less frequent though more
intense in the Atlantic basin [70]. As such, during sensitiv-
ity analysis, the mean of the Weibull distribution is right-
shifted by up to 40% to reflect a more intense environment.
The Poisson parameter is also increased or decreased to
reflect different frequency scenarios, in a manner similar to
Staid et al. [71].
The integrated outage prediction and agent-based
model then begins. First, tolerance thresholds are set for
the parameters that induce agents into action. Details of
these thresholds are discussed throughout this subsection.
Additionally, parameters that support an agent’s categori-
cally distributed beliefs about experiencing no, one, or
more than one outage in any given year are assigned. These
parameters are Dirichlet distributed and updated through-
out the run. Noninformative priors are used in the current
model. The model then starts in year one and no agents are
assumed to own a generator at this time. The Poisson fre-
quency distribution is sampled to determine the number of
hurricanes to occur in the year. If no hurricanes occur, the
model advances to updated beliefs on the likelihood of an
outage. If one or more hurricanes occur, the Weibull inten-
sity distribution is sampled to assign a regional peak wind
speed for each hurricane. The hurricane(s) with the maxi-
mum centroid wind speed that is closest to the sample wind
speed is then selected from the library and a peak 3-s wind
speed is assigned to each census tract. Next, the outage-
prediction model is used to translate those wind speeds into
the number of customers within each census that are likely
to lose power using the random forest model of Guikema
et al. [19]. This model has been validated using extensive
out-of-sample testing. Each agent residing within each cen-
sus track is then probabilistically assigned an outage pro-
portional to the fraction of customers to lose power in that
census tract. Those agents who experience an outage but
possess a generator are included in the customers without
power count; this count is an indicator of utility’s reliability.
A separate tally records how many agents own a generator.
Agents’ recent outage experiences then induce learning
in a manner similar to [72]. The Dirichlet conjugate priors,
which reflect each agent’s experience up to that point, are
updated in the typical Bayesian manner to include their out-
age experience in that year. Each agent has a different simu-
lated experience, meaning they each may have different
beliefs over their outages likelihoods. This learning model
is representative of a “perfect world” class of models where
agents use all experiential data to methodically inform
beliefs. In Section IV-B, this Bayesian model is compared
6  Proceedings of the IEEE
with an availability bias model, which limits the amount of
information agents use to when forming beliefs.
The decision portion of the model then begins. Most of
the decision rules take an “if–then” approach and are based
on reasonable assumptions and observed behavior of indi-
viduals after hurricanes. Ultimately, each agent is assigned
an action based on his or her experience during the storm,
the experience of people within his or her neighborhood,
and beliefs. An agent without a generator may purchase one,
file a complaint, or do nothing. Two scenarios, the base-
line and neighbor scenario, are considered for purchasing
a generator. In the first scenario, an agent will buy a gen-
erator if he or she does not have one, can afford one, pos-
sesses a sufficiently high expectation for the likelihood of
future outages, and is sufficiently confident that one outage
or more than one outage will occur. Confidence is the ratio
of the variance to the mean of the posterior Dirichlet belief
parameters. When this ratio is small, the agent is more con-
fident. The second scenario tests the influence of neighbors.
The same purchasing conditions from the baseline scenario
are applied. In addition, an agent will buy a generator if no
neighbors within “extension cord length” (i.e., 15 m) have a
generator, but at least some fraction of neighbors within 100
m have a generator. This reflects the logic where an agent who
mitigates encourages neighbors to mitigate as well by implic-
itly sharing information about their risk. This phenomenon
has been empirically observed in flood mitigation [73] and
evacuation in anticipation of a hurricane [74] and it is highly
reasonable to assume it would happen to some degree in this
setting. However, agents within extension cord length (15 m
in this case) are less likely to purchase a generator because
they can free ride. Power-sharing is consistently observed
after major outage events, from NYC urbanites who shared
power with neighbors to power cell-phones after Hurricane
Sandy [75] to Chicago suburbanites who share power
with neighbors to power sump-pumps after heavy thun-
derstorms [76]. The intent is rarely to power an entire
house, but rather critical electronics (e.g., cellphones,
freezers, health-monitoring devices). Some news outlets
even encourage power sharing as a means to make amends
with the often-troubling buzzing that accompanies genera-
tors [77]. As such, in the neighbor scenario, those agents buy
a generator only if the baseline scenario conditions are met
and they have relied their neighbor’s power often in recent
history. The neighbor scenario and the baseline scenario are
ultimately compared to understand whether power-sharing
could impact system reliability.
The cost of filing a complaint is relatively low com-
pared to the cost of purchasing a generator, and generally
consists of the time needed to make the actual filing. As
such, the personal barriers to filing a complaint are low.
An agent without a generator files a complaint when they
believe their likelihood of losing power is sufficiently high
or if they have experienced a significant number of out-
ages recently.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
An agent with a generator is most likely to do nothing;
after all, they have power. There is a possibility that an agent
with a generator files a complaint if a sufficient fraction
of his or her neighbors lose power. If most neighbors lose
power, this suggests that the agent likely lost power too and
is running a generator. Practically, this is a nuisance because
many generators require fuel, the generator may not pro-
vide enough electricity to power the entire demand, and
neighbors may take advantage of this power supply, as
discussed above.
If a sufficient fraction of agents complain, regulators
take action. Regulators may either issue an information
campaign or force the utility to harden its system so outages
are less likely in the future. An information campaign is trig-
gered when a certain fraction of agents file a complaint and
is modeled in the following manner. First, a separate model
that uses the same frequency and intensity parameters and
synthetic hurricane library is used to estimate each agent’s
true likelihood of losing power. This is done by simulating
a 100 000-year synthetic record while assuming agents do
not make changes to the system. Once complete, a categori-
cal distribution over the likelihood of experiencing no, one,
or more than one outage in any given year is calculated for
each agent. This is an agent’s true outage likelihood. This is
saved and rerun only when the system is hardened or differ-
ent intensity and frequency parameters are used. Second,
agents’ beliefs on the likelihood of outages are updated. An
effective information campaign adjusts the parameters of
the Dirichlet priors so that the categorical distribution over
their beliefs of an outage is equivalent to their true likeli-
hood of an outage. A less effective information campaign
will adjust the parameters of Dirichlet priors by some frac-
tion so that their beliefs over outages is a weighted average
of the true outage likelihood and the beliefs held by the
agents previously.
If a sufficient fraction of customers lose power or if a
sufficient fraction files a complaint to the regulator—
two forces that are inherently interwoven—the utility is
required to harden its system. Practically, a utility that
hardens may trim trees, underground distribution lines, or
upgrade aging components. Advanced and costly hardening
treatments, such as moving away from standard radial con-
figurations toward advanced auto-looping with integrated
smart switches, are being considered by some disaster-prone
utilities [78]. In this model, when a system is hardened, the
fraction of customers who lose power is adjusted (lowered)
according to the extent of the hardening.
Because ABMs like ours involve significant assumptions
and simplifications regarding human behavior, sensitivity
analyses were performed to capture the effects of variations
in these assumptions on the model output. This is done by
both changing the model’s structure (e.g., adding a neigh-
bor scenario) and by repeatedly changing parameter values
and rerunning the ABM. Complete model validation would
require extensive historic household data on power outages
Reilly et al. : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
and generator purchases. Because these data have not been
collected and because the intent of our study is to under-
stand potential impacts of individual behavior on power
outage risk, we rely on sensitivity analysis to evaluate the
validity of our model assumptions.
The model is looped M times to reflect an M-year syn-
thetic record and the entire M-year synthetic history is sim-
ulated repeatedly until convergence criteria are met.
I V.   C A SE ST U DY
A realistic case study is built primarily to demonstrate
the types of analyses that can be conducted by the model
described in Section III and also to test a small subset of
possible hypotheses. A key advantage of agent-based mod-
els is provided by the tuning parameters. They may generate
scenarios that result in unexpected outcomes, and, in some
cases, demonstrate how small adjustments to some param-
eters may produce large effects.
There are two ways to measure customers without
power: 1) the sum of all customers who lost power, regard-
less of their generator status; and 2) the sum of all custom-
ers who lost power less the number of customers who lost
power but own a generator. Both are tracked to reflect how
the utility performs and how customers fair.
A small portion of scenarios and results are presented.
These are intended to reflect the types of hypotheses this
model can explore. Additionally, some sensitivity analyses
are presented to demonstrate how robust the outcomes are
to changes to parameters. However, the number presented
represent relatively few of all possible analyses. More sce-
narios and sensitivity analyses should be explored when
examining a real system.
A. Case Study Region
Household data from nine counties in the State of
Maryland were collected for the case study. These counties
are located in southern and eastern regions of Maryland
and touch the Chesapeake Bay (Fig. 2). In total, 357 000
electric-power customers (households) reside in this region.
Publically available tax-assessor data are used to spatially
locate each house and to assign each house a value [80].
Anne Arundel County is the most populated and is mostly
suburban. Ocean City, in Worcester County, has dense
housing. The remainder of the region is either suburban or
rural. The value of the property is used as a proxy for wealth,
with the assumption being that a wealthier agent is more
likely to buy a generator. No agents own a generator when
the model is initialized.
The State of Maryland experiences a hurricane every
11–13 years on average [81]. The majority of those storms
are of Category 1 strength or below by the time they impact
the region. Hurricane intensity tends to be greatest in
the southern-most counties, and especially Somerset and
Worcester Counties.
Proceedings of the IEEE   7
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Reilly et al . : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
Fig. 2. Map of region [79]. Counties in light gray are used in the study.
A 50-year record is used and convergence is determined
via the total number of customers to lose power. A 90% con-
fidence level with a relative error of 10% required, approxi-
mately, 125 iterations for each set of parameters.
B. Availability Bias
One’s experience during and after a recent hazard can
induce mitigation behavior, regardless of how mild or
strong their experience up to that hazard has been [82].
This results from an availability bias where beliefs depend
on events that are easy to recall, typically because of their
recentness [83]. This implies that individuals do not always
use their entire risk understanding when making the choice
and may underestimate their risk. In this test, the effect of
this type of availability is compared to agents who are unbi-
ased in their response. In this case, an unbiased agent is one
who buys a generator when they believe their risk of outages
is sufficiently high based on his or her experience. From a
policy stance, this type of tradeoff analysis may assist offi-
cials in determining whether encouraging mitigation on a
yearly basis is beneficial.
In this test, the unbiased case is tested under the following
conditions: 1) no information campaigns are disseminated, so
agents use historical observations to estimate their likelihood
of an outage; and 2) an effective information campaign is dis-
tributed yearly, so agents use their true likelihood of an out-
age when making the decision to purchase a generator. Under
the bias case, an agent buys a generator if he or she has had
at least two outages in the past five years. In order to focus on
mitigation, no complaints are made and no hardening occurs.
Wealth is not a factor in deciding to buy a generator. The
results that follow use the current climate scenario.
Fig. 3 shows the distribution over all replications of the
cumulative number of outages over the 50-year synthetic
8  Proceedings of the IEEE
Fig. 3. Density plot of cumulative number of agents to lose power
comparing cases where agents possess availability bias with ones
where they do not. The gray, orange, and blue plots exclude agents
who lost power but own a generator. No hardening is conducted
and wealth is not a factor. The current climate scenario is used.
history. The gray plot reflects an unbiased case with no infor-
mation campaign and the orange plot reflects the same, except
with yearly information campaign. The blue plot reflects the
availability-biased case. These first three distributions do not
include outages that are prevented because of a generator.
The green distribution reflects all outages, regardless of gen-
erator ownership. This last distribution is identical in all cases
because no hardening is ever conducted.
The results may surprise some. The scenario where
agents’ beliefs about outages perfectly align with their true
risk due to an information campaign (orange) produces
slightly more outages than the scenario where agents rely
on their experience to form beliefs (gray). In the case with
information, agents who are going to purchase generators
do so at the first opportunity that they have, thus reducing
the cumulative outages. In the case where no information
is disseminated, more generators are purchased overall,
and the time when they are purchased, on average, is later
than the former case. The reason for this is that given the
stochastic nature of hurricanes, there are occasions when
agents overestimate their risk, especially when strong hurri-
canes occur in rapid succession which “artificially” increases
agent’s Bayesian beliefs regarding their likelihood of one or
more outages. When this overestimate is above their risk tol-
erance, they buy a generator.
Agents who possess availability bias are motivated to pur-
chase generators, but not at the same rate as the other cases.
Under this climate scenario, hurricanes intense enough to
cause significant outages occur infrequently in close succes-
sion. This may leave agents unprepared for future storms.
Fortunately, it does appear to cut the cumulative total of
outages in the extreme scenarios in half.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
In reviewing Fig. 3, the scenario where agents are
unbiased with no information yields the least variability in
resulting customers without power. In this scenario, a large
number of replications result in approximately half a mil-
lion customers without power. More variation is observed
in the results of the unbiased with information and biased
scenarios, indicating that the results of these scenarios are
more greatly influenced by the agent’s behavioral response
to the stochastic hurricane simulation than in the unbiased
with no information scenario.
C. A Changing Climate
While significant uncertainty remains, the general con-
sensus is that hurricanes in the Atlantic basin will become
more intense and less frequent in the future. The number
of customers limits the number of outages in any region
and the number of customers in the model is assumed to
be fixed. It is possible, for example, that a more intense
environment will have little impact if the region is already
highly vulnerable to outages (e.g., [65]). In order to simu-
late the possible effects of a changing climate, we exam-
ined one future climate scenario in which the frequency of
storms is doubled (Fig. 4) and another scenario where the
frequency of storms declines (to 75% as frequent) while the
typical storm is 50% more intense (Fig. 5). The same set of
scenarios from Section IV-B are used for these simulations.
We chose these climate scenarios to evaluate the impact of
this sort of significant change in climate assumptions on our
model, not to attempt to simulate the more likely future cli-
mate scenario.
Fig. 4. Density plot of cumulative number of agents to lose power
comparing cases where agents possess availability bias with ones
where they do not. The gray, orange, and blue plots exclude agents
who lost power but own a generator. No hardening is conducted
and wealth is not a factor. The frequency of hurricanes is doubled
over the current climate scenario in the plot on the left.
Reilly et al. : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
Fig. 5. Density plot of cumulative number of agents to lose power
comparing cases where agents possess availability bias with ones
where they do not. The gray, orange, and blue plots exclude agents
who lost power but own a generator. No hardening is conducted
and wealth is not a factor. The frequency of hurricanes is reduced
to 75% and the intensity is increased by 50% over the current
climate scenario.
The discussion begins with Fig. 4, where the frequency
is doubled. When more hurricanes occur, the count of the
total number of outages that includes those who own a gen-
erator (green) increases significantly; the mean of the distri-
bution approximately doubles and the variance decreases.
The mean of the distribution for the number of outages
less those agents with a generator for the bias case (blue)
is approximately the same as the current climate scenario,
though the variance is narrower. Under the more intense
climate, there are simply more occasions of multiple hur-
ricanes happening in rapid succession. This leads agents to
believe they are at higher risk for outages. The importance
of this is especially notable in the beginning of the study
period. When more hurricanes happen initially, agents buy
a generator earlier and are not counted later as experiencing
an outage. This contributes to the variance reduction.
The unbiased scenario with information dissemination
(orange) eclipses the scenario without information dissemi-
nation (gray); slightly more agents buy a generator in the
former but the timing in which they make the purchase is
the difference. Here, the agents who ultimately buy a gener-
ator, because their actual risk is greater than what they can
tolerate, do so the first opportunity they have. In the other
case, even an underestimate of risk may result an agent pur-
chasing a generator if the underestimate is above their risk
threshold. However, on average, they recognize that their
risk tolerance is exceeded later.
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Reilly et al . : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y

When the frequency is reduced and the intensity
increased by 50% (Fig. 5), the mean total number of out-
ages, including those at houses with a generator (green),
does not significantly increase over the current climate
scenario (Fig. 3). However, the variance increases consider-
ably. The larger variance is primarily linked to experiencing
fewer but more intense storms—two phenomena that pro-
duce opposite consequences.
The biased case (blue) causes slightly more outages on
average compared to the current climate scenarios. This is
in part due to more severe storms, which make some peo-
ple lose power who typically would not under the current
climate. Additionally, storms are spaced further apart on
average, making it relatively rare for an agent to “remem-
ber” the last outage. That leads them to be more vulnerable
to outages in the future because their bias only uses more
recent information. The unbiased cases produce results that
are close to the baseline conditions. This suggests that under
these conditions, the behavioral response to outages—pur-
chasing a generator once the threat is computed to be above
one’s threshold—can compensate for the additional hazard.
D. Collective Versus Individual Action
Even small contingents of agents who purchase genera-
tors reduce the overall all demand for system hardening.
This could lead to a situation whereby those agents who
can afford to mitigate do, and the consequences for poorer
agents are not expected to improve. This tradeoff is demon-
strated via the following scenarios: one where no one buys a
generator and another where agents whose house is valued
at least at the median for the region and who have a moder-
ate tolerance of one or more outages buy a generator. The
threshold for filing a complaint is kept low to focus on the
effects of declining collective action due people engaging
in individual action. No information is distributed and the
utility is required to harden when at least 50% of agents file
a complaint. Reliability improvements of 5% and 20% are
tested. The current climate scenario is used.
Fig. 6 shows density plots over the set of simulations for
the cumulative number of agents to lose power, including
those agents who own and rely on generators. The left shows
results from the case where agents do not buy generators.
The plot on the right shows the same, except that agents
whose home is valued above the region’s median consider
buying a generator. The gray distributions show the results
when no hardening is conducted; the plots are identical in
both figures. 1.3 million outages are expected in the study
region over the time frame, though the distribution is wide.
The orange and blue plots show the results from a 5% and
20% improvement in system performance, respectively.
When the hardening is modest at 5%, having a signifi-
cant fraction of the population consider purchasing a gen-
erator does not substantially subtract from the efforts of
collective action. In this situation, 5% improvement is not
significant enough to dramatically alter the risk landscape,
even after a few hardening episodes. It is not that the num-
ber of people participating in collective action is maintained
(it is not), but that system improvement is inadequate, at
5%, to see a substantive reduction to outages. When the sys-
tem is improved by 20%, the benefits are obvious, especially
when significant collective action is present (left on left).
In addition to a reduction in the number of outages, which
itself is not surprising, the variance is greatly reduced. In the
case where no one buys a generator, the number of outages

Fig. 6. Density plot of the cumulative number of agents to lose power, including agents who own a generator. On the left, no agents buy a
generator. On the right, agents whose home is valued above the region's median consider buying a generator. Low thresholds for filing a
grievance and for purchasing a generator (right) are assigned to the agents. The distributions for the no hardening case (gray) are identical.

10  Proceedings of the IEEE

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in the extreme right tail is only slightly more than the mean
of cumulative outages in the case where half the popula-
tion considers purchasing a generator and no hardening is
conducted.
A final note on the plot on the left in which no genera-
tors are purchased: The average number of times that collec-
tive action induces hardening when the improvement is 5%
is 5 times. The average number of times when the improve-
ment is 20% is 2.6 times. This suggests that only a couple
of significant improvements to the system can dramatically
reduce grievance rates and alter the reliability compared to
multiple minor improvements.
E. Influence of Neighbors
One’s neighbors and local community often have sig-
nificant influence over mitigation and preparation behavior.
The act of mitigating sends a signal to others in the com-
munity of how an individual perceives his or her risk and
may trigger others to follow. This is tested in the following
manner. In all cases, all agents are allowed to buy genera-
tors. The first case is the base case and neighbors have no
effect. In the second case, those who would otherwise buy a
generator (because of their beliefs and confidence about the
risk of one or more outages) refrain if they have a neighbor
within 15 m of their house with a generator. The thought
is that they would be able to free-ride and use a neighbor’s
power if needed. However, if they have relied on their
neighbor at least twice in the previous ten years, they buy
a generator. In the third case, agents buy generators as they
would otherwise, based on beliefs and confidence in their
beliefs. In addition, they buy a generator if at least 50% of
their neighbors within 75 m own a generator. The final case
combines the second and the third. This type of analysis
can illuminate a type of emergent behavior—where agent
behavior instantaneously propagates—and can only be seen
from this type of bottom-up approach. In this set of cases,
agents buy a generator if they believe they have a moderate
likelihood of outages. No hardening is conducted.
Fig. 7 provides results for the cumulative number of
outages excluding outages where agents own a generator.
The gray plot demonstrates a scenario where agents do not
influence one another. The orange plot represents the first
neighbor case, where agents are deterred from buying a gen-
erator if a close neighbor owns one. The blue plot represents
the second neighbor case, where agents are encouraged to
buy a generator when at least 50% of their neighbors within
100 m owns one.
All three cases perform approximately the same suggest-
ing that the influence of neighbors would need to be more
significant to have a more pronounced effect. However, the
right extreme of the three plots highlight the differences. In
the first neighbor case, there are more realizations where
much higher than average outages are experienced. This is
due to free-riding and prevents agents from acting. In the
Reilly et al. : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y
Fig. 7. Density plots of cumulative number of agents to lose power
excluding agents who lost power but own a generator for three
neighbor scenarios. The gray plot shows the case where neighbor
have no influence over the decisions of others. Case 1 (orange)
shows the effects of when agents are deterred from buying a
generator if they can free-ride. Case 2 (blue) shows the effects of
when agents are encouraged to purchase generators when at least
50% of their neighbors own one. Hardening is not conducted and
wealth is not a factor. The current climate scenario is used.
second neighbor case, there are fewer realizations than the
other cases. However, it is not significant. In this case, an
agent’s perception of the risk is fairly aligned with its neigh-
bors because of spatial proximity, meaning they often simi-
larly engage in mitigation. Future iterations of this model
could consider a more complex approach for modeling risk
perception and preferences.
F. Sensitivity Analysis
Sensitivity analysis is arguably the key component for
deriving maximal benefit from ABMs. It allows the analyst
to quantify the degree to which marginal changes to param-
eters—which, in reality, may be random variables—and
small changes to model structure affect system outcomes.
This, in turn, shows which parameters and model structure
are driving the system and which lack substantive influence.
This is important not only for behavior models but also for
other probabilistic, physical phenomenon. This subsection
reexamines a portion of that discussed in Section IV-D.
Specifically, the threshold for filing a grievance and the
degree to which system hardening reduces the likelihood
of experiencing an outage are perturbed to quantify the sig-
nificance of these parameters. In this set of experiments, the
threshold for filing a grievance is raised to a moderate level
(i.e., the threshold is set to near the middle of the observed
range of agents’ beliefs for an outages) and then the effec-
tiveness of hardening is perturbed, such that hardening has
no impact or decreases the likelihood of an outage by 10%,
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Reilly et al . : Hurricanes and Power System Reliabilit y

Fig. 6 (left). This is interesting because an improvement to

Fig. 8. Density plot of the cumulative number of agents to lose
power under different hardening scenarios. No agents buy a
generator and agents choose whether to engage in collective
action via grievance. A moderate threshold for filing a grievance is
assigned to the agents. The distribution for the no hardening case
(gray) is identical to those in Fig. 6.
10% has significant impact on the system despite a fewer
number of occasions in which hardening is conducted. This
is because hardening leads to fewer outages which makes
agents less likely to file a grievance and agents have a higher
threshold before they file a grievance.
Returning solely to Fig. 8, it is apparent that as harden-
ing becomes more effective, the expected number of out-
ages declines. However, the marginal decline between 10%
and 15% (orange and blue) is nearly identical to the decline
between 15% and 35% (blue and green), even though the
change in the productivity of hardening in the latter sce-
nario is more substantial. The reason follows. When hard-
ening improves from 10% to 15%, the effect on the number
of outages is initially modest in the runs. However, because
the effect is only modest, agents are likely to file a grievance
again, and with enough mass, system hardening is conducted
again. This is not true when hardening improves from 15%
to 35%. The effect from the first instance of hardening is sig-
nificant, but fewer agents are likely to file grievances in the
future. It is atypical hardening is conducted once again. This
demonstrates the importance of not only hardening, but the
cycle of hardening and the agents’ behavioral response to
changes in the system.

15%, or 35%. This will assess the influence of both harden-
ing and behavior, and particularly, whether filing grievances
and hardening in combination are impactful. This is espe-
cially valuable, because to date, the link between hardening
and reduction in the likelihood of outages has not been stud-
ied in a statistical sense. In these sets of scenarios, the cur-
rent climate condition is used, no generators are purchased,
and no information is disseminated. As in Section IV-D,
once 50% of agents file a grievance, the system is hardened.
Fig. 8 shows the results for the case where the threshold
for filing a grievance is moderate and for the 0% (gray), 10%
(orange), 15% (blue), and 35% (green) hardening scenarios.
The gray plots in Figs. 6 and 8 are identical. The orange plot
in Fig. 8 has fewer outages on average and the distribution
has a lower variance than the comparable orange plot in
V.   CONCLUSION
Hurricanes cause widespread and prolonged electric-power
outages. The presumption is often that a utility’s reliability
is a result of its unique hazard landscape and managerial
decisions. The framework developed in this paper addition-
ally shows how customers’ behavioral response may have a
role in shaping this risk landscape. The framework is par-
ticularly powerful because its structure is grounded in the
social science literature and it does not necessarily have
intensive data requirements. Numerous hypotheses can be
explored via sensitivity analyses to see how small changes to
the system could produce macrolevel changes. This has the
opportunity to provide substantive insight for regulators,
operators, and other decision makers on how the regional
risk may evolve over time. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Allison C. Reilly received the M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees in civil engineering and infrastructure
systems from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
and the B.S. degree in civil engineering from The
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
She is currently an Assistant Professor with
the Department of Civil and Environmental Engi-
neering, University of Maryland College Park,
College Park, MD, USA. Her research interests
include risk analysis in urban areas, network optimization, and infra-
structure system reliability.
Gina L. Tonn received the B.S. degree in biological
systems engineering from Virginia Tech, Blacks-
burg, VA, USA, the M.S. degree in management of
technology from Vanderbilt University, Nashville,
TN, USA, and the Ph.D. degree in geography and
environmental engineering from The Johns Hop-
kins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher
with the Wharton Risk Management Center, Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Her research interests
include risk analysis for natural hazards and infrastructure systems.
Chengwei Zhai received the B.S. degree in electri-
cal engineering from Zhejiang University, Zhejiang
Sheng, China. He is currently working toward the
M.S. degree at the Department of Industrial and
Operations Engineering, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
His research interests include risk analysis,
decision analysis, machine learning, and simulation.
Seth D. Guikema received the B.S. degree in civil
and environmental engineering from Cornell Uni-
versity, Ithaca, NY, USA, the M.E. degree in civil
and environmental engineering from the Univer-
sity of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand,
and the M.S. degree in civil and environmental
engineering from Stanford University, Stanford,
CA, USA, and the Ph.D. degree in engineering risk
and decision analysis from the Department of
Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University.
He was a faculty member with the Department of Civil Engineering,
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA, from 2005 to 2007 and
a faculty member with The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, USA,
from 2008 through 2015. He is currently an Associate Professor in the
Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering with a joint appoint-
ment in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, MI, USA. His research focuses on data-driven risk analysis for
technical systems, in particular, infrastructure systems impacted by natu-
ral disasters and intelligent attacks.

14  Proceedings of the IEEE