Resilience assessment for the built environment of a virtual city

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.) are considered. Once the buildings are integrated into the city, parallel simulations are applied to compute the system functionality following a disruptive scenario. Nonlinear response of a multi degree of freedom model for each residential building is obtained considering the dominant modal shapes and irregularities. The post-elastic behavior is estimated through collapse analysis which allows identification of the over strength factor associated to the most probable failure mechanism of the building. Monte Carlo Simulations (MCS) are applied in order to take into account the epistemic uncertainties associated with geometry and mechanical properties within the range of observations. For each set of buildings’ data, the nonlinear dynamic analysis is performed through SAP2000 application programming interface (API) in order to assess the dynamic response of the buildings in an organized and automatic fashion. Accordingly, the city is mapped into different zones representative to the possibility of having different levels of damage (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.