Real-Time City-Scale Time-History Analysis and Its Application in Resilience-Oriented Earthquake Emergency Responses

Abstract

The resilience of cities has received worldwide attention. An accurate and rapid assessment of seismic damage, economic loss, and post-event repair time can provide an important reference for emergency rescue and post-earthquake recovery. Based on city-scale nonlinear time-history analysis (THA) and regional seismic loss prediction, a real-time city-scale time-history analysis method is proposed in this work. In this method, the actual ground motion records obtained from seismic stations are input into the building models of the earthquake-stricken area, and the nonlinear time-history analysis of these models is subsequently performed using a high-performance computing platform. The seismic damage to the buildings in the target region subjected to this earthquake is evaluated according to the analysis results. The economic loss and repair time of the earthquake-stricken areas are calculated using the engineering demand parameters obtained from the time-history analysis. A program named, “Real-time Earthquake Damage Assessment using City-scale Time-history analysis” (“RED-ACT” for short) was developed to automatically implement the above workflow. The method proposed in this work has been applied in many earthquake events, and provides a useful reference for scientific decision making for earthquake disaster relief, which is of great significance to enhancing the resilience of earthquake-stricken areas.