Seismic Scenario

Overview

Fallen over building from earthquake
       Figure 1: Damaged Building after 2018 Taiwan Earthquake (Photo from SkyNews)                   

Extreme events such as earthquakes can trigger complex interdependencies between the various infrastructure systems of society. Modeling such interdependencies is challenging due to the complexity and multi-disciplinary setting of the problem. Motivated by these challenges, a distributed computing platform capable of handling the various dimensions of the problem is proposed to assess seismic resilience. The proposed framework is modularized to connect models or simulators representing different aspects of the problem such as city layout, regional seismic ground motions, structural responses, structural and non-structural damage, loss assessment and physical and social recovery trajectories. Each simulator is considered as a black box that takes inputs from different simulators in the framework and provides outputs to be used by other simulators. This black box can be substituted/improved without affecting the other simulators in the framework.

Framework

Flowchart of SRTI Server
 Figure 2: Implemented Framework

The proposed framework is modularized in such a way that connects different models or simulators from different disciplines, each of which represents various aspects of the problem such as city layout, regional seismic ground motions, structural responses, structural and non-structural damage, loss assessment and physical and social recovery paths simulation. Each simulator is considered as a black box that takes inputs from other simulators and provides outputs in a specific format to be used by other simulators. This black box can be replaced by any level of detailed model that takes the input and provides the output in the same format as the original one.

Implementation

Accordion for Earthquakes
 Figure 3: Steps of the implemented framework

The framework consists of five main stages:

Stage 1: The first step in the proposed framework is to define the community being studied. The city simulator provides all other simulators in the framework with information about the community being studied including coordinates, elevation, occupancy, material, structural system, structural and nonstructural component specifications and quantities and time period of all the buildings in the community.

Stage 2: The ground motion simulator takes the ground motion history at the underlying rock or “rocklike” layer of the recording station as an input. Then, it propagates the ground motion vertically through different soil layers and horizontally under each building at each time step during the earthquake.

Stage 3: The estimation of the structural and non-structural damages is implemented in Building and component damage simulators.

Stage 4: The losses resulting from earthquake damage of buildings are expressed in terms of potential casualties, repair cost, downtime, unsafe placarding status and amount of debris resulting from damaged components.

Stage 5: Using available resources, the physical and social recovery trajectories are estimated and used to assess the seismic resilience of the studied community.

Team

Developer(s): Omar A. Sediek

Supervisors:  Dr. Sherif El-Tawil, Dr. Jason P. McCormick

Downloads:

TBA


This project is supported by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) through grant 1638186 (CRISP Type 2: Interdependencies in Community Resilience (ICoR): A Simulation Framework). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed on this site are those of the project team members and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.