Probabilistic Quantification of Hurricane Resilience of Communities through a Distributed Simulation Platform

Resilience is an essential requirement in mitigating the effects of natural hazards such as hurricanes. This paper presents a framework to probabilistically quantify the damage of residential communities subject to hurricane hazards which is an essential step in quantifying community resilience. An engineering-based vulnerability model is developed for typical residential buildings. In particular, damage due to the two mechanisms of net pressure and wind-borne debris impact on the envelope components is considered. By integrating full hurricane wind field models into the framework, damage can be estimated for any given hurricane category and storm track. A distributed simulation platform, using Lightweight Communications and Marshalling (LCM) libraries, is proposed for modeling the debris-induced interdependencies between the damages sustained by the buildings defining the community.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grants ACI-1638186 and CMMI-1562388. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors