G. P. Cimellaro

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The ability of a community to respond effectively to emergencies is closely linked to the wellbeing of its infrastructure. Many global infrastructures are outdated, making them particularly vulnerable to natural disasters like earthquakes. In this context, this paper introduces a simulation-based approach to measure and improve the resilience of la...

Earthquake is one of the natural disasters that affects the buildings and communities in developing countries. It causes different levels of damages to the buildings, making them uninhabitable for a period of time, called downtime (DT). This paper proposes a Fuzzy Logic hierarchical method to estimate the downtime of residential buildings in develo...

In the present paper, a form-finding of shallow grid shells was introduced based on the multi-body rope approach (MRA) for the definitions of vaults with optimized shapes and different hole percentages. In order to obtain experimental validation, a physical model was reproduced at the laboratory scale performing ad hoc measurements to compare the o...

Search and rescue operations during emergencies are complex missions that put at risk the life of first responders. The main challenge is to detect the trapped and injured people inside buildings damaged by different hazards. With a tool showing on a map the number, location and health status of victims, first responders would be able to significan...

This paper focuses on the dynamic characterization of a historical building located in the port city of Livorno (Italy), Palazzo Rosciano. It is a masonry structure built in the second half of the 1600 and fully renovated in the nineties to accommodate the offices of the North Tyrrhenian Sea Port Authority. The research was carried out starting fro...

In this paper, a simplified method aimed at generating ground motions records using a Fourier amplitude spectrum model obtained by a response spectrum is presented. The use of white noise with specific conditions on the variance and inter‐frequency correlation allows to get a realistic variability of the Fourier amplitude spectrum. Moreover, a two‐...

This paper focuses on the seismic vulnerability assessment of two existing port buildings located in Livorno (Italy): a former railway station bombed and reconstructed after WWII, and a historical building ("Palazzo Rosciano"）built during the 17th century and refurbished in the nineties. Both of them show various problems, such as cracks and settle...

Many classes of engineering problems focus on the process of calibrating mathematical models using observed data. The enormous progress of scientific computation and data-mining techniques has allowed the search for accurate mathematical models from experimental data using algorithms. Among them, the evolutionary polynomial regression (EPR) is an a...

Natural and human-made disasters can disrupt infrastructures even if they are designed to be hazard resistant. While the occurrence of hazards can only be predicted to some extent, their impact can be managed by increasing the emergency response and reducing the vulnerability of infrastructure. In the context of risk management, the ability of infr...

Due to the increasing frequency of disastrous events, the challenge of creating large-scale simulation models has become of major significance. Indeed, several simulation strategies and methodologies have been recently developed to explore the response of communities to natural disasters. Such models can support decision-makers during emergency ope...

The capacity of a community to react to and resist during an emergency situation is highly related to the proper functioning of its infrastructure systems. Improving infrastructure response and recovery capacity through management and adaptation strategies can help increase community resilience. Infrastructural assets are considered outdated in alm...

Modern communities rely heavily on infrastructure systems for their economic development. In particular, road transportation networks are essential to provide connections within and outside communities. In addition, damages to the road infrastructure can result in damages to other systems (e.g., power, water, telecommunication networks). The unavai...

On August fourteen of 2018, a portion of the highway connection viaduct over the Polcevera Valley in Genoa, Italy collapsed, and resulted in forty-three deaths, and many injuries. In the aftermath of the tragic event, in search of answers, a number of studies focused on various scenarios pertaining to the causes of the collapse, i.e. sustained effe...

The coupled effects of corrosion and earthquake action on bridges piers are investigated in this study. Starting from a literature review to collect existing corrosion models, a bridge overpass is selected to perform seismic analyses. It allows to assess the degrading seismic capacity of the bridge pier at different periods due to general and pitti...

Resilience indicators are a convenient tool to assess the resilience of engineering systems. They are often used in preliminary designs or in the assessment of complex systems. This paper introduces a novel approach to assess the time-dependent resilience of engineering systems using resilience indicators. A Bayesian network (BN) approach is employ...

Availability of resources is one of the primary criteria for communities to attain a high resilience level during disaster events. This paper introduces a new approach to evaluate resourcefulness at the community and national scales. Resourcefulness is calculated using a proposed composite resourcefulness index, which is a combination of several re...

This chapter highlights some of the main drivers and challenges for research on risk control of critical infrastructure systems, relates to selected similar road-mapping approaches for motivating the overarching main questions posed to the working groups, and attempts to formulate some more operational sample questions for each workshop topic. Resi...

This paper presents the structural and damage assessment of a reinforced concrete (RC) beam subjected to a four-point bending test until yielding of reinforcing steel. The deterioration progress was monitored using different nondestructive testing (NDT) techniques. The strain was measured by distributed fiber optic sensors (FOSs), embedded prior to...

Localization and indoor tracking of rescuers and victims are essential during emergency management in post-earthquake conditions because those allow search and rescue teams to be faster and more efficient. While several indoor tracking technologies have been developed over the past years, localization and tracking are still a challenge during emerg...

Morandi’s Polcevera viaduct was an important transportation link that connected port of Genoa to other major cities in Europe. The bridge was in service for over 50 years and carried the traffic over one of the busiest highways in Europe. Real-time structural health monitoring would have provided data for maintenance and warned of impending failure...

The efficient movement of goods is crucial to the economic growth of communities. This makes the existence of seaports essential for the marine transportation system. Due to their natural location, ports are continuously threatened by natural hazards such as wind action. The work presented here aims at assessing the resilience of ports against extr...

The 2016 Central Italy earthquake caused many collapses of existing masonry buildings that had previously been retrofitted with reinforced concrete roofs. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of these roofs in the seismic behaviour of masonry buildings. Simple analytical models are presented to illustrate two typical out-of-plane collapse m...

The main aim of this study is to develop a new straightforward approach to assess the overturning risk of furniture. The proposed formula is based on the geometrical parameters of the furniture and seismic intensity measures. In particular, the equation is identified by fitting the data obtained by Housner’s mechanical model from the literature. Th...

Recent natural and man-made disasters (e.g. earthquake, tsunami or floods) have induced increased attention in quantification of their impact on residential buildings, which are designed to withstand damage through their elastic and plastic deformations. The damage can make the buildings to be unsafe, and consequently unoccupied for a period of tim...

The complexity of large-scale power networks, together with their increasing ageing and obsolete design, implies an intrinsic fragility with respect to natural disasters, such as strong earthquakes. The investigation of the interdependencies among different critical infrastructures is fundamental to prevent possible cascading effects and frequent u...

The ignition of fires in urban environments due to seismic shocks is a phenomenon that has been studied for a long time in literature. It is a secondary seismic effect that is analyzed in order to create efficient protective solutions. In this research the occurrence of Fire Following Earthquake (FFE) at urban scale is investigated. A virtual reali...

Sensor-enabled infrastructure systems are destined to empower resilient communities with more intelligence and sustainability, and therefore enhance the operational safety of physical infrastructure. Through online and onboard monitoring, the infrastructure components incorporating appropriate analytic and predictive modeling tool not only provides...

Immediately after an earthquake a healthcare system within a city, comprising several hospitals, endures an extraordinary demand. This paper proposes a new methodology to estimate whether the hospital network has enough capacity to withstand the emergency caused by an earthquake. The ability of healthcare facilities and to provide a broad spectrum...

The primary objective of the Performance-Based Seismic Design (PBSD) is to provide stipulated seismic performances for building structures. However, a certain degree of design freedom is needed for matching a specific seismic response. This design freedom is not obtainable by the conventional lateral resisting systems because their stiffness and st...

ArCo, Art Collections 2020, Conference on Cultural Heritage, Safety and Digital Innovation. ArCo Conference will take place in Florence, Italy on the 28-30 May 2020. It is an International Conference dedicated to innovative experiences in Museums and Art Collections. The call for abstract is open from the 25th of June to the 15th September 2019...

MCEER's "4-R" approach to Resilience put a question about the quantification of Resourcefulness, which is capacity to identify problems, establish priorities, allocate and mobilize resources before, during and after an event that threaten to disrupt some element, system, or other unit of analysis. Since there are no attempts in literature to quanti...

Resilience indicators are a convenient tool to assess the resilience of engineering systems. They are often used in preliminary designs or in the assessment of complex systems. This paper introduces a novel approach to assess the time-dependent resilience of engineering systems using resilience indicators. The temporal dimension is tackled in this...

Natural and man-made disasters have caused a significant impact on residential buildings worldwide. The damaged buildings stay unoccupiable for a period of time, called the downtime. This chapter introduces a new methodology to predict the downtime and the resilience of building structures using Fuzzy logic. Generally, the downtime can be divided i...

Seismic damage simulation at the regional scale provides valuable information that can facilitate decision making and disaster mitigation, reducing both human and economic losses. Building damage assessment after an earthquake event is one of the crucial activities in seismic loss estimation. The amount of generated debris and the associated effect...

This paper evaluates the level of inoperability and the resilience of the critical infrastructure networks of the New York Metropolitan Area affected by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. The region analyzed in the case study includes New York City and some New Jersey counties. The highly concentrated critical infrastructures of this area are vulnera...

It has been observed in different parts of the world that offshore earthquakes occurred in coastal regions were followed by tsunamis and catastrophic damages due to cascading effects. In this paper, an innovative methodology for the estimation of direct damage losses and resilience for a given community is presented. It combines two existent method...

The multiple uncertainties of both natural and man-made disasters have prompted increased attention in the topic of resilience engineering. In this paper, an indicator-based method for measuring urban community resilience is proposed. The method is based on the PEOPLES framework, which is a hierarchical framework for defining disaster resilience of...

Residential buildings are designed to withstand earthquake damage through their elastic and plastic deformations. The damage causes the buildings to be unoccupiable for a period of time, called the downtime. This paper introduces a method to predict the downtime of buildings using a Fuzzy logic hierarchical scheme. Generally, downtime is divided in...

Earthquake-induced collapse of building structures has been effectively controlled in recent years, however, failure of non-structural components and secondary disasters induced by falling debris remain a serious matter, making the outdoor evacuation more dangerous. A pedestrian evacuation simulation framework considering earthquake-induced falling...

Cyber-security is of paramount importance: there is an industry built around it, with people spending their lives securing systems, and other people spending theirs trying to get into those very same systems. It is a never-ending process that requires both parties to always think ahead of the opponent and, as time passes, the stakes get higher and...

The Italian school buildings asset consists of over 40,000 units. The most (more than 60%) were built before the introduction of the national standard on school buildings and constructions in seismic areas. The present research aims to implement a methodology that consists in an informative modelling for seismic risk analysis. The objective of the...

The disproportionate collapse of an existing cable-stayed bridge was investigated at the numerical level by employing a validated model from the literature and the applied-element method. An earthquake input was used for the numerical simulations and applied at increasing intensity to assess the bridge response. The role of redundancy in the bridge...

The paper presents a new methodology to assist decision-makers in the management of critical events such as earthquakes evaluating the recovery time, and the resilience index of a building system that is a component of the physical infrastructure dimension of the PEOPLES Resilience framework. The interdependencies between building system and transp...

This paper provides an empirical probabilistic model for estimating the downtime of lifelines following earthquakes. Generally, the downtime of infrastructure varies according to several factors, including the characteristics of the exposed structure, the earthquake intensity, and the amount of available human resources. Having so many variables ma...

Small-scale shaking table platforms are usually used in seismic engineering courses to study the structural dynamic behavior of small scale specimens and investigate innovative solutions, such as active and passive control systems. Furthermore, they are also useful to actively involve students in learning programs in higher education. This paper il...

Infrastructure systems are crucial for the development of communities as they provide essential services to the habitants. To improve the resilience of such systems, their intrinsic properties need to be understood and their resilience state needs be identified. In the literature, several methods to evaluate networks' reliability and resilience can...

A three-dimensional (3-D) base isolation system to control both the horizontal and vertical components of ground motion is presented in this paper. The system is adopting a negative stiffness device (NSD) that can be considered as an adaptive passive protection system, which can apparently change the stiffness of the structure. This work is focused...

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 building...

The efficient movement of goods is crucial to the economic growth of communities. This makes the existence of seaports essential for the marine transportation system. Due to their natural location, ports are continuously threatened by natural hazards such as wind action, which necessitates a continuous monitoring and assessment for their performanc...

To improve the resilience of critical infrastructure systems, their intrinsic properties need to be understood and their resilience state needs to be identified. In the literature, several methods to evaluate networks’ reliability and resilience can be found. However, the applicability of these methods is usually restricted to small-size networks....

Last decades have been characterized by an increasing number of disasters all over the world. Therefore, the concept of community resilience has attracted the attention of the scientists who started to explore and assess the ability of communities to recover after undesirable events. In this work, a method for assessing the earthquake community res...

The efficient movement of goods is crucial to the economic growth of communities. This makes the existence of seaports essential for the marine transportation system. Due to their natural location, ports are continuously threatened by natural hazards such as wind action, which necessitates a continuous monitoring and assessment for their performanc...

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 building...