Operational Evaluation Method Research Articles

Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to resist, adjust, recover and adapt when suffering an external disturbance. Beijing is confronting a serious earthquake risk because severe earthquake disasters have occurred many times in Beijing’s history. Thus, the seismic safety and resilience is the crux of the disaster prevention and mitigation of Beijing. Although many studies have been conducted on the earthquake resilience, operational evaluation methods and tools for regional seismic resilience are still absent. Supported by Beijing Earthquake Agency, the Tsinghua team proposes an operational quantitative evaluation method for community resilience. The assessment of earthquake safety and resilience is conducted to a typical community as a study case. A corresponding system platform is also developed. This research mainly includes: the evaluation system for community resilience; the resilience evaluation for the building system; the resilience evaluation for the transportation system; the resilience evaluation for the lifeline system; and the resilience evaluation for the non-physical system. A software platform for applying the resilience evaluation is developed. As shown in the evaluation results, the total resilience level of the community needs to be improved. Specifically, the transportation system has a higher capacity to meet demands compared with other systems. The resilience level of the building system is low, but its capacity to meet the demands is relatively stable at different seismic intensity levels. The resilience level of the lifeline system is high when the seismic intensity is small, but rather low when strong earthquake occurs, which means its capacity to meet demands is sensitive to the seismic intensity. Based on the above results, several measures for resilience enhancement are discussed with respect to the building system. The seismic safety and resilience evaluation are quantitatively performed in this study, taking the community with several subsystems as a study case. The results can be used as a demonstration to provide a reference for the popularization and application in Beijing in the future.

Read full abstract