Study Concept on the Development of an Urban Cyber Physical System for Enhancing the Capability to Respond to Large-Scale Earthquakes

Abstract

Various technologies for improving earthquake-disaster-mitigation capability in urban communities are being developed and proposed. However, these technologies are sometimes difficult to use in actual applications due to the lack of incentives for owners of buildings or infrastructures, because the owners cannot calculate their cost-effectiveness and thus consider the installation payment for these technologies as a cost to be reduced. To address this problem, we propose the construction of an “Urban cyber physical system (CPS).” This urban CPS evaluates the earthquake-resistant capability of buildings and/or social infrastructures to help owners easily understand the cost-effectiveness of adopting these technologies. The CPS also calculates the effects of newly-developed technologies, thereby allowing owners to accept new technologies based on their effectiveness. The study concept of the urban CPS is as follows: (1) Construction of an “Information platform” by using data aggregation and analysis of existing vibration data of structures, datasets of building (or construction) information modeling and various other available databases; (2) Development of a “Simulation platform” that has a prediction function to calculate the behaviors of urban communities during earthquakes by using data in the Information platform and an identification function to identify structural systems from input earthquake motions and responses of structures; and (3) Establishment of an “Eco-system” to operate the urban CPS in urban community design, based on the perspective of earthquake resilience.