  Urban systems, composed of households, businesses, and infrastructures, are
continuously evolving and expanding. This has several implications because the
impacts of disruptions, and the complexity and interdependence of systems, are
rapidly increasing. Hence, we face a challenge in how to improve our
understanding about the interdependencies among those entities, as well as
their responses to disruptions. The aims of this study were to (1) create an
agent that mimics the metabolism of a business or household that obtains
supplies from and provides output to infrastructure systems; (2) implement a
network of agents that exchange resources, as coordinated with a price
mechanism; and (3) test the responses of this prototype model to disruptions.
Our investigation resulted in the development of a business/household agent and
a dynamically self-organizing mechanism of network coordination under
disruption based on costs for production and transportation. Simulation
experiments confirmed the feasibility of this new model for analyzing responses
to disruptions. Among the nine disruption scenarios considered, in line with
our expectations, the one combining the failures of infrastructure links and
production processes had the most negative impact. We also identified areas for
future research that focus on network topologies, mechanisms for resource
allocation, and disruption generation.
