Development of a simulation platform to model, assess and visualize the earthquake disasters in city level

Cities tend to be more vulnerable due to the high and unplanned concentration of people, buildings and infrastructures. This study presents a simulation platform, called YouSimulator, for the automatic modeling, assessment and visulazation of the seismic responses of urban areas. The proposed platform, which is primarily based on a C++ code, consists of four basic modules: (a) the automatic modeling module; (b) the response computing module; (c) the results analyses module; and (d) the 3-D visualization module. A high-performance algorithm is developed to realize the automatic physics-based modeling by utilizing the GIS database. The efficiency of the parallel computing can be maintained almost stable as the number of processes increases, by equivalently balancing the work load between different processes. Based on the computed damage states of each building, the global behavior of the cities and the demand of shelters in each local community are obtained. The nonlinear time history responses of about one million buildings in a Chinese large city can be achieved within 10 minutes by the scalable parallel computing. The proposed platform appears to be a promising tool for large-scale simulation and earthquake-resilience assessment of urban areas and cities.