Seismic damage assessment of a virtual large-scale city model

Recent social developments and economic transformation have changed the engineering design approach from building design level towards community design level (city, region, country). The latter approach involves modeling of interconnections between different systems (buildings, transportation, water network, etc.) rather than designing the buildings individually. Thus, new analysis tools are expected to be developed to simulate the complex response of a community subsequently to disasters. The need of such rational tools is the object of this research work. Two different numerical approaches to simulate the response of a large-scale built environment after a seismic scenario are explored by developing multipurpose numerical codes. A district of a virtual city is considered as a case study and the level of damage for built environment is estimated. This work could be the first step for further urban loss analysis, e.g. through agent-based models that could be updated online with the proposed simulation.