Towards assessing the resilience of a community in seismic events using agent based modeling

This paper describes a framework for assessing the resilience of an urban community during and after an earthquake. A scenario seismic event is used as loading input to a virtual city, which is composed of a variety of building types (e.g., low-rise, mid-rise, etc.) and building occupancies (e.g., commercial, healthcare, residential, and government). The damage to the built environment due to seismic loading is estimated using HAZUS. Subsequently, the interaction of people and the damaged built environment is modeled using agent-based modeling (ABM). A community's resilience is conditioned on its ability to resist the impacts of a disaster and the ability to recover from that disaster. The community's resilience is a function of the performance of individual buildings, organizations, and people within the community. The performance of individual buildings is measured based on loss of building functions and services due to the seismic damage and accounts for infrastructural and organizational redundancies. Damage to buildings within the virtual city is aggregated to determine the overall impact on the city. Organizational and individual resilience is based on human willingness to respond, given disruptions caused by the earthquake. A community's recovery is defined by how well and how quickly the individual components of a community and the networked community are able to return to normalcy after a disaster. Negative impacts from disasters can be reduced through proper emergency preparation and seismic mitigation techniques implemented prior to the disaster. The disruption to a city center during an earthquake is dependent upon the community's ability to resist the earthquake. Resistant communities will have less damage and fewer losses, causing fewer disruptions to services and lifelines when an earthquake occurs.