The capacity of a community to react and resist to an emergency situation is strictly related to the proper functioning of its own infrastructure systems. This paper proposes a simulation oriented approach to evaluate the resilience of large scale water distribution networks. The case study used in this research is the water network of a large scale virtual city. The water network is modeled using the software EPANET 2.0 with the help of an integrated Matlab toolbox. The network consists of 16000 junctions and 19000 water pipes buried under the road network of the city. A series of earthquake scenarios is applied to the water network and the damage induced by the earthquakes has been determined using fragility function. The failure of the system occurs when the water flow and the water pressure go below a certain threshold. The resilience of the network is then evaluated using two indices: (1) the number of users without water, (2) the loss of total water supply. ... Read more

Community resilience is becoming a growing concern for authorities and decision makers. This paper introduces two indicator-based methods to evaluate the resilience of communities based on the PEOPLES framework. PEOPLES is a multi-layered framework that defines community resilience using seven dimensions. Each of the dimensions is described through a set of resilience indicators collected from literature and they are linked to a measure allowing the analytical computation of the indicator’s performance. The first method proposed in this paper requires data on previous disasters as an input and returns as output a performance function for each indicator and a performance function for the whole community. The second method exploits a knowledge-based fuzzy modeling for its implementation. This method allows a quantitative evaluation of the PEOPLES indicators using descriptive knowledge rather than deterministic data including the uncertainty involved in the analysis. The output of the fuzzy-based method is a resilience index for each indicator as well as a resilience index for the community. The paper also introduces an open source online tool in which the first method is implemented. A case study illustrating the application of the first method and the usage of the tool is also provided in the paper. ... Read more

Recent social developments and economic transformation have changed the engineering design approach from building design level towards community design level (city, region, country). The latter approach involves modeling of interconnections between different systems (buildings, transportation, water network, etc.) rather than designing the buildings individually. Thus, new analysis tools are expected to be developed to simulate the complex response of a community subsequently to disasters. The need of such rational tools is the object of this research work. Two different numerical approaches to simulate the response of a largescale built environment after a seismic scenario are explored by developing multipurpose numerical codes. A district of a virtual city is considered as a case study and the level of damage for built environment is estimated. This work could be the first step for further urban loss analysis, e.g. through agent-based models that could be updated online with the proposed simulation. ... Read more