Resilience Assessment for the Built Environment of a Virtual City

Abstract

Abstract. This paper presents a new methodology to predict the potential damage and physical impacts of earthquake on the built environment through nonlinear dynamic simulations. A virtual city consisting of different building categories has been designed. Four building sectors that provide essential functions to a community, including housing (residential building, hotel, shelter, etc.), education (school, university, library, etc.), business (shopping center, retail store, heavy industry, etc.), and public services (hospital, police station, church, airport, etc.) (complete, extensive, moderate, and slight). This methodology allows decision-makers to explore how their community will respond to a disruptive event, quantify the performance of critical infrastructure following a hazard, and to plan better resilience-building strategies in order to minimize losses and recovery time.

Integrated platform to assess seismic resilience at the community level

“…Performing urban large-scale simulations, some generalizations and simplifications on the building portfolio are necessary to overcome the lack of data and to limit the computational workflow. Therefore, a surrogate model to describe the lateral behavior of each building is herein adopted by considering the relationship between its base shear and top horizontal displacement (Marasco et al (2017); Noori et al (2017)). The lateral stiffness properties are modeled through a parameterized backbone curve, where the post-elastic line is characterized by progressive decreasing stiffness, while hysteresis is accounted through the Takeda model (Takeda et al, 1970).…”

“…Elastic parameters are identified by the values of base shear and top displacement that cause the yield of the weakest column. Post-elastic parameters are assessed based on the upper-bound theorem of limit analysis and the equal energy rule (Marasco et al, 2017). These parameters allow to define a backbone curve representative of an equivalent Single-Degree-Of-Freedom (SDOF) model for each building.…”