Beyond System Resilience: New Approaches To Understand The Symbiosis between Systems and Communities
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The recent devastating earthquakes in Turkey are a stark reminder of the risk natural hazards pose to many communities around the world despite significant advances in our understanding of the hazards and substantial improvements in design and construction techniques. Such catastrophic events occur more and more frequently due to urbanization and a rapidly changing climate. Mitigating this increasing risk is challenging because a large part of our cities’ building inventory and infrastructure were constructed before the introduction of modern building codes. Since strengthening all vulnerable structures is not economically feasible, cities are incentivized to collect valuable data on their buildings and communities and use it to prioritize traditional retrofits and develop other types of interventions.
Regional simulation of natural hazard events and their impact on cities promises to help us better understand critical vulnerabilities in the built and social environment and design effective interventions to address them. I introduce the components of high-resolution regional disaster simulations and illustrate the insights these calculations can provide today. Data scarcity makes it challenging to develop robust simulations, and – despite the rapidly growing application of remote sensing – certain important building features will remain difficult to identify at scale. I review machine learning and uncertainty quantification methods that researchers can use to infer missing data and characterize the uncertainty in simulation results due to imperfect and incomplete inputs. The presented methods are part of an open-source disaster simulation platform developed and supported by the NSF-funded NHERI SimCenter, and I explain how researchers can access this platform for free and leverage the included tools and resources in their work.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Dr. Ramirez Marquez is Director of the Enterprise Science and Engineering Division and Professor in the School of Systems & Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology. A former Fulbright Scholar, he holds degrees from Rutgers University in Industrial Engineering (Ph.D. and M.Sc.) and Statistics (M.Sc.) and from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Actuarial Science. His research efforts focus on the development of mathematical models for the analysis and computation of system operational effectiveness – reliability and vulnerability analysis as the basis for designing system resilience. He also works at the intersection of evolutionary computation for the optimization of complex problems associated with system performance and design. His most recent research explores the interplay between data visualization and analytical decision-making. In these areas, Dr. Ramirez-Marquez has conducted funded research for both private industry and government and, has published over 100 refereed manuscripts in technical journals, book chapters, and industry reports.