ABSTRACT
The resilience of cities has received worldwide attention. An accurate and rapid assessment of seismic damage, economic loss, and post-event repair time can provide an important reference for emergency rescue and post-earthquake recovery. Based on city-scale nonlinear time-history analysis and regional seismic loss prediction, a real-time city-scale time-history analysis method is proposed in this work. In this method, the actual ground motion records obtained from seismic stations are input into the building models of the earthquake-stricken area, and the nonlinear time-history analysis of these models is subsequently performed using a high-performance computing platform. The seismic damage to the buildings in the target region subjected to this earthquake is evaluated according to the analysis results. The economic loss and repair time of the earthquake-stricken areas are calculated using the engineering demand parameters obtained from the time-history analysis. The method proposed in this work has been applied in many earthquake events. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) the uncertainty problem of ground motion input is resolved properly by the proposed method based on the real-time ground motion obtained from the seismic stations; (2) the amplitude, spectrum, and duration characteristics of ground motions as well as the stiffness, strength, and deformation characteristics of different buildings are fully considered in this method based on the nonlinear time-history analysis and multiple-degree-of-freedom models; (3) using the real-time city-scale time-history analysis and the corresponding report system, the assessment of the earthquake’s destructive power, human uncomfortableness, repair time, and economic loss can be obtained shortly after the earthquake event, which provides a useful reference for scientific decision-making for earthquake disaster relief. This work is of great significance to enhancing the resilience of earthquake-stricken areas.
