Development and Implementation of a Graph-Based Framework for Socio-Economic Resilience in Urban Systems

Urban systems are becoming increasingly complex due to rapid urbanization, socio-economic disparities, and climate change. Addressing these challenges requires innovative approaches that integrate data-driven methodologies with resilience planning. This paper presents a novel extension to the Urban System Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) framework by integrating socio-economic indicators into a graph-based modeling environment, enabling a more holistic understanding of urban resilience. Our approach advances existing models by operationalizing multi-domain resilience through a graph-based framework that captures complex interdependencies across critical infrastructure, governance, finance, and vulnerable populations. Unlike prior USAH applications, which focused primarily on acute shocks, the proposed model captures interdependencies across infrastructure, environmental conditions, health systems, economic robustness, public finance, and social cohesion. Several graph metrics were analyzed including betweenness centrality, and system-level resilience metrics. Sensitivity testing of the indicator weighting scheme showed that increasing the influence of the network structure from 0.7 to 0.9 betweenness centrality shifts indicator importance toward structurally central nodes while reducing the influence of sub-indicator averages. However, the system-level resilience remained unchanged across scenarios. Beyond traditional centrality measures, we introduce new network metrics that identify system stabilizers, key policy leverage points, cross-domain dependencies, and overall structural fragility. Together, these measures transform the model from a descriptive mapping tool into a practical decision-support framework for resilience planning.