Smart cities to improve resilience of communities

This paper presents a new approach to predict the potential damage and physical impacts of an earthquake on the built environment. A new methodology to the urbanized systems and large-scale simulations within a seismic scenario is explored, by evaluating multipurpose codes for numerical simulation. A 3-D building shape of a standard virtual city is developed for evaluat-ing the seismic effects at increasing intensities. Four different building sectors that provide essential functions to a community, including housing, education, business, and public ser-vices are considered. Once the buildings are integrated into the city, parallel simulations are applied to compute the system functionality following a disruptive scenario. Tri-linear elasto-plastic backbone curve representative of global shear behavior of each building is estimated considering the dominant modal shapes and building irregularities. Monte Carlo Simulations (MCS) are applied 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 In-terface (API) in order to assess the dynamic response of the buildings in an organized and au-tomatic 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 supports decision-makers to explore how their community will respond to a disruptive event, to develop different strategies for monitoring and control the emergency in urbanized areas, and to plan better resilience-building and evacuation strategies.