Assessing the impact of seismic scenarios and retrofits on community resilience using agent-based models

• Published in: International journal of disaster risk reduction Vol. 111; p. 104678
• Main Authors: Han, Xu, Koliou, Maria
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.09.2024
• Subjects: Agent-based model (ABM); Community resilience; Retrofit strategy; Seismic hazards; Seismic hazards; Agent-based model (ABM); Community resilience; Retrofit strategy
• ISSN: 2212-4209; 2212-4209
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104678

The recent magnitude-7.8 earthquake in Turkey and Syria is a bracing reminder of how severe the damage an earthquake imposes on our society can be. Seismic resilience analysis in which the robustness, recoverability, and adaptivity of infrastructure systems are investigated has been a research topic attracting wide attention for the last few decades. So far, the subject of seismic resilience analysis has evolved from individual structures to an entire community/region. A community can be considered as a system of systems, including residential, lifelines, healthcare, education, and economic, among others. Interdependency among different systems in a community is crucial in the modeling of the recovery process. The closed-form empirical functionality recovery model, which might be applied in the resilience assessment for individual structures, is hardly applicable to community-level resilience analysis. Agent-based modeling is an approach that can effectively characterize the behavior and interplay among entities in either the same system or different systems. By creating agent-based models (ABMs) simulating the community recovery process, community resilience can be quantified with a high degree of accuracy, provided that the behavior of agents and the interactions among different types of agents are defined in an accurate manner. This study employs the agent-based modeling approach in conducting seismic resilience analysis for Centerville, a virtual community testbed located 50 miles from the New Madrid seismic zone. The resilience analysis results obtained can facilitate decision-making on how to allocate limited resources when a community is subjected to seismic hazards.