3.11. Research Opportunities

This testbed and its supporting 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 contributions from the community are especially welcome:

  1. The current use of HAZUS for damage and loss modeling limits the buildings under consideration to 6 stories and under. Therefore, the user community is invited to support the extension of PELICUN to buildings taller than 6 stories.

  2. Extensions to taller buildings will require further expansion of the building inventory’s fields to capture attributes relevant to those classes of construction. Methods to mine relevant data from imagery or other third-party data sources, e.g., Emporis, will provide welcome extensions to the Asset Description approaches described herein.

  3. The testbed will benefit from continued validation efforts, mining larger cross-sections of data assembled by StEER and others and spanning a wider range of vintages of construction, i.e., YearBuilt.

  4. 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.

  5. A number of approximations and assumptions were made in the generation of the building inventory (see Asset Description). 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 to include other classes of construction and eventually component-level damage quantification.

  6. The current implementation considers only wind hazards and thus will warrant extension to include flood losses similar to the approach adopted in the Atlantic County, NJ testbed. This will also enable a more faithful comparison with the multi-hazard assessments conducted by StEER and FEMA (see Getting Started).

  7. The current implementation considers only wood residential construction and thus would benefit from extension to other building classes in a manner similar to that exercised in the Atlantic County, NJ testbed.

  8. The current pre-trained BRAILS models can be extended to new regions where construction practices may differ. Please refer to the discussion on the generalization of BRAILS models

  9. Importantly, the rulesets used to demonstrate how a hindcast testbed could be swiftly implemented were ported over from New Jersey. These rulesets need updating to match the regulatory environment in Louisiana and to capture the behaviors and norms in this region, such as the low rates of window protection observed by StEER ([Roueche21]).

  10. The SimCenter aims to incorporate increasing levels of fidelity in its characterization of hazards, modeling of buildings (to support the application of pressures/loads and structural analysis), and the 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 a considerable need for community research contributions such as libraries of fragilities, archetype building models, and catalogs of high-fidelity hazard simulations (hindcasts of historical events or synthetic storm data). This is particularly the case for coastal hazards. With aspirations to replicate this workflow in other regions, these contributions are not confined to the Louisiana/Gulf Coast. Their integration into the testbed can demonstrate how the contributions of individual researchers can aggregate to evaluate impact on much larger scales.

  11. The testbed does not explicitly address the effects of debris (wind-borne or surge-transported), nor are any of the flow fields translated into pressures acting on individual buildings to enable the execution of structural analyses. Extending the workflow to tall buildings provides opportunities for response simulation to estimate drifts or other EDPs for more dynamically sensitive structures under wind. However, similar opportunities to translate geospatially varying hazards into loads on a given structure can be leveraged to increase the workflow’s overall fidelity.

Roueche21

Roueche, D. Kameshwar, S. Vorce, M. Kijewski-Correa, T. Marshall, J. Mashrur, N. Ambrose, K. Brown, C. Childress, O. Fox, D. Morris, K. Rawajfih, H. Rodriguez, L. (2021) “Field Assessment Structural Teams: FAST-1, FAST-2, FAST-3”, in StEER - Hurricane Laura. DesignSafe-CI. https://doi.org/10.17603/ds2-dha4-g845