Modeling Interactions in Community Resilience

A new platform, based on distributed computing concepts, is proposed with the potential to model the physical, social, and economic interactions that occur during disasters. The platform uses lightweight communications and marshalling (LCM) libraries for message passing and data marshalling thereby enabling various types of simulators to interact together. Each simulator is discipline specific, represents one part of a disaster scenario, and is viewed as a black box that subscribes to data from other simulators and/or publishes its results for other simulators to use. The new LCM framework is versatile and scalable and, as such, enables the developed system to grow through addition of new simulators provided by other users. The new concepts are demonstrated through an introductory case study that is focused on the simulation of wind induced progressive damage due to both the structural response of the building as well as the external wind pressures.