Simulating interacting multiple natural-hazard events for lifecycle consequence analysis

Abstract

Among different types of natural-hazard interactions (simply multi-hazard interactions hereinafter), some occur through the nature of the hazards themselves, regardless of the presence of any physical assets: they are often called モLevel Iヤ (or occurrence) interactions. In such cases, one hazard event triggers or modifies the occurrence of another (e.g., severe wind and flooding; liquefaction and landslides triggered by an earthquake), thus creating a dependency between the parameters characterising such hazard events. They differ from モLevel IIヤ (or consequence) interactions, which instead occur through impacts/consequences on physical assets/components and systems (e.g., accumulation of physical damage or social impact due to earthquake sequences, landslides due to the earthquake-induced collapse of a retaining structure). Multi-hazard Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) aims to quantify the consequences (e.g., repair costs, downtime, and casualty rates) expected throughout a systemメs service life, accounting for both Level I and Level II interactions. Nevertheless, the available literature generally considers these interactions mainly defining relevant taxonomies, often qualitatively, without providing a computational framework to simulate a sequence of hazard events in terms of their occurrence times and features and resulting consequences. This paper aims to partly fill this gap by identifying modelling approaches associated with different Level I interactions. It describes a simulation-based approach for generating multi-hazard scenarios (i.e., a sequence of hazard events and associated features through the systemメs life cycle) based on the theory of competing Poisson processes. The proposed approach incorporates the different types of interactions in a sequential Monte Carlo sampling method. The method outputs potential sequences of events throughout a systemメs life cycle, which can be integrated into LCA frameworks to quantify interacting hazard consequences. A simple application is presented to illustrate the potential of the proposed method.

    Similar works