Interdisciplinary Multi-Language Community Resilience Simulation using Simple Run-Time Infrastructure (SRTI)

Extreme natural hazards, such as severe earthquakes and hurricanes, can trigger intricate inter-dependencies between the critical infrastructure systems of society, including the built environment (e.g., buildings and bridges), elements of social organization (e.g., social power and cohesion), and institutional arrangements (e.g., policies, politics, economics, and disaster mitigation). Such inter-dependencies can adversely influence community resilience, i.e. the ability to recover from an extreme event, usually measured in terms of loss of life and economic cost. Our objective is to develop a computational framework that allows researchers from different natural hazards research sub-fields to link their computational models together to study the effects of infrastructure inter-dependencies on community resilience. In particular, our focus is on the inter-dependencies that arise between infrastructure robustness, social organization, and policy in the context of community resilience. Infrastructure robustness, which is the ability to respond favorably to the demands of extreme events (e.g. so that a building does not collapse during a severe earthquake), derives from policy. It directly impacts social organization and both play a role in determining casualty rates. Casualty rates, in turn, influence future policy.

The “Simple Run-Time Infrastructure” (SRTI) is an open-source framework that can be used for data-communication across simulator programs in different languages. SRTI is based on a client-server structure and uses a publish-subscribe pattern to realize data communication between the distributed simulators for different fields. This approach provides a scalable, versatile, and user-friendly solution for integrating multiple discipline-specific models in hazards simulation. Each simulator is treated as a black box that interacts through the SRTI distributed computational platform. In this project, an example implementation that consists of a group of developed simulators for assessing the impacts of earthquakes on community resilience is presented. The shown example consists of fourteen simulators each of which represents a different aspect of the community. Thirteen of the developed simulators are implemented in MATLAB while the other simulator (i.e. visualization simulator) is implemented in NetLogo.