Abstract
With the goal to facilitate evaluation and mitigation of the risks from natural hazards, the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure’s Computational Modeling, and Simulation Center (NHERI SimCenter) is developing computational workflows for regional hazard simulations. These simulations enable research to combine detailed assessments of individual facilities with comprehensive regional-scale simulations of natural hazard effects. By integration of multi-fidelity and multi-resolution models to assess natural hazard impacts on buildings, infrastructure systems and other constructed facilities, the approach enables the engineering analysis of public policies and socio-economic impacts. Effective development of platforms for high-resolution regional simulations requires modular workflows that can integrate state-of-the-art models with information technologies and high-performance computing resources. In this paper, the modular architecture of the computational workflow models is described and illustrated through testbed applications to evaluate regional building damage under an earthquake and a hurricane scenario. Developed and disseminated as open-source software on the NHERI DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure, the computational models and workflows are enabling multi-disciplinary collaboration on research to mitigate the effects of natural hazard disasters.
Highlights
Much of the world’s population lives in regions susceptible to earthquakes, tropical cyclones or other natural hazards, where the risks are exacerbated by buildings and aging civil infrastructure that often are not designed to resist the hazards
While knowledge and data gained through field observations and experiments are fundamental to addressing these challenges, computational simulations are an essential component of the science and engineering needed to evaluate and mitigate the potential devastating effects of natural hazards
This paper describes the background and details of the SimCenter’s ongoing development of computational workflows to integrate software applications for simulating earthquake and hurricane effects on communities
Summary
Much of the world’s population lives in regions susceptible to earthquakes, tropical cyclones (hurricanes) or other natural hazards, where the risks are exacerbated by buildings and aging civil infrastructure that often are not designed to resist the hazards. The SimCenter’s computational framework for natural hazards engineering leverages foundational advancements in performance-based engineering to integrate models and data from the physical sciences, engineering, and social sciences to evaluate and design strategies to create resilient communities. Methods for regional risk assessment (e.g., HAZUS) and performance-based design (e.g., FEMA P-58) were developed independently, where the former relied on simplified damage and loss models to assess large inventories of facilities, and the latter focused on detailed analyses of individual facilities. This evolution reflected both the primary goals of the methods and the capabilities of computational modeling technologies to perform the analyses. In the SimCenter’s framework, high-resolution multi-fidelity regional analyses are facilitated by cloud-enabled high-performance computing and informational technologies to create computational workflows
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