Due to the increasing frequency of disastrous events, the challenge of creating large-scale simulation models has become of major significance. Indeed, several simulation strategies and methodologies have been recently developed to explore the response of communities to natural disasters. Such models can support decision-makers during emergency operations allowing to create a global view of the emergency identifying consequences. An integrated platform that implements a community hybrid model with real-time simulation capabilities is presented in this paper. The platform's goal is to assess seismic resilience and vulnerability of critical infrastructures (e.g., built environment, power grid, socio-technical network) at the urban level, taking into account their interdependencies. Finally, different seismic scenarios have been applied to a large-scale virtual city model. The platform proved to be effective to analyze the emergency and could be used to implement countermeasures that improve community response and overall resilience.

This work aims at establishing laboratory requirements and testing conditions in order to understand the physical and emotional stability of people during a ground shaking. Several individuals with different human characteristics (gender, age, height, etc.) are considered in the test. Two different laboratory setups are presented. A position device (Kinect) and video targetless tracking algorithm has been used to collect the human body position during the shaking. A two and a three dimensional shaking tables are used to generate artificial earthquakes with different frequency bands. In addition, a well detailed virtual reality setting is applied to the testing site in order to illustrate the real environment. During the experiment, a special attention has been given to the factor of “surprise”, which is necessary to ensure a natural reaction of the individuals. The result of the experiment proved common behaviors among the individual samples during the shaking. This work is considered a first step towards a large test campaign, which is necessary to obtain comprehensive statistics on this topic.

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.