Applications of Artificial Intelligence in GIS to Urban Planning for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation

Abstract

This chapter presents a state-of-the art application of a logical combination of geographic information system (GIS) and artificial intelligence (AI) to urban planning for earthquake disaster mitigation. The evolution of GIS has provided scientists and engineers with powerful tools for the modeling of large amounts of spatially related geographic data. However, many applications require not only calling data from GIS but also more sophisticated inference and assessment mechanisms. The chapter describes AI technology such as fuzzy assessment and neural networks, in particular for site evaluation, forecasting the distribution of ground motion, and the potential of liquefaction. In addition, an application of AI + GIS to urban planning for earthquake disaster mitigation for Xin Xiang City, a mid-size city in Central China is given as an example. Based on the concept of GIS, management software with a graphical data base that is similar to commercial GIS is developed, in particular for seismic zonation and disaster mitigation plans. GIS can be used not only because of its ability to deal with extremely large data sets of spatially referenced information, but also because of the ability to dynamically and automatically retrieve the data and manipulate it to derive new information. The information required and referenced in seismic zonation is usually stored and retrieved spatially with analog maps, tables and characters. When people treat them manually, there is limited capacity for compiling, updating and combining from multiple maps, and the process is time-consuming and labor intensive. GIS can be used to nonmanually process the spatially referenced information.