1.8. Opportunity Areas for Future Refinements

This testbed and its backing workflows should be viewed as a sandbox and scaffold, respectively, within which the community can explore different scenarios and develop new capabilities. The following list itemizes some areas where contribution from the community is especially welcome:

  1. A number of approximations and assumptions were made in the generation of the building inventory. There is considerable opportunity to expand, enrich and improve upon methodologies for automated inventory generation, particularly to generate other attributes necessary as the workflow advances toward component level damage quantification.

  2. The SimCenter aspires to incorporate increasing levels of fidelity in its characterization of hazards, modeling of buildings (to support application of pressures/loads and structural analysis), and ability to describe damage at the component level, with fault-trees that capture cascading damage sequences resulting from breaches of the building envelope. Thus there is considerable need for community research contributions such as libraries of fragilities, archetype building models, and catalogs of high-fidelity hazard simulations. For instance, extensions to tall buildings would require further expansion of the workflow to reliable and efficient methods that support multi-fidelity analysis with both detailed finite element tall building models and MDOF models.

  3. Currently the workflow calculates damage and monetary loss; coupling the workflow with other social, societal or economic models, will provide opportunities to more robustly explore the impacts of hazard events, mitigation investments and development decisions on community resilience. The creation of techniques to automatically scrape and fuse data from the social, human and behavioral sciences will ensure those datasets can be generated in a manner similar to those used for the building inventory itself.

Note

Community members who wish to contribute to the testbed in any of the above (or other) areas can express their interest by completing this survey.