AN OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK FOR SIMULATING THE CRITICAL FUNCTIONS OF A CITY BEFORE AND AFTER A DISASTER

Abstract eng:
This paper will present an extension of the computer program Rt, a program first presented by Mahsuli & Haukaas in 2012. A key motivation behind Rt is to facilitate probabilistic analysis with many interacting models for hazards, buildings, and costs. Until now Rt has been used for regional seismic risk analysis with relatively simple models for each building, without modeling flow through networks that serve societal critical functions. The extended program presented in this paper, named Rts, introduces models for infrastructure such as bridges, ports, power substations, pumping stations, treatment plants, storage tanks, etc. The object-oriented software architecture of Rt is maintained and class maps are presented in this paper to show, for instance, how aspects of the damage prediction are shared between classes of infrastructure. This paper also presents a new concept for modeling flow through networks crucial for emergency management, e.g., transportation of people, food, medical supplies, water, electrical power, and fuel. The object-oriented architecture of Rts now includes roadways, trucks, ambulances, water pipelines, power lines, shipping channels, etc. together with new objects called “packets.” Packets can contain an array of materials, such as fuel, food, water, and medical supplies and these packets move through the network at run-time. Time is incremented forward during the simulation, with earthquakes and other hazards occurring randomly according to probabilistic occurrence models. If an earthquake occurs it may cause closure of one or more bridges, effectively closing routes traversed by trucks, thus preventing packets from moving to its destination. The new object-oriented network modeling approach does not explicitly separate between layers of networks, such as power networks, water network, and road networks. Power substations are connected to pumping stations by power lines, all objects in Rts. Hence, a failure of a power line causes failure of a pumping station, which in turn causes water outage. This explicit approach for modeling network flow and infrastructure interdependencies is explained and also demonstrated by examples in this paper.

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