Rodrigo Costa

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Department of Systems Design Engineering

This paper addresses the need for new measures and models of infrastructure performance that can facilitate the strengthening of community resilience to disasters. While many infrastructure measures and models focus on performance in terms of disaster-induced damage, from the perspective of populations and cities that would be affected, there is a...

An agent-based object-oriented model for household displacements is presented and used to analyze household decision-making after a hypothetical earthquake in the City of Vancouver, Canada. Temporary displacements and permanent relocation are accounted for. The model for households include considerations of socioeconomic demographics, social networ...

A framework of agent-based models for housing recovery is presented and used to investigate post-earthquake recovery in the City of Vancouver, Canada. Housing recovery is modeled for a portfolio of buildings, contrasting with the practice of assessing the reconstruction of buildings in isolation. Thus, the presented approach better captures the eff...

A methodology is presented to combine the synthetic minority over-sampling technique and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator to analyze survey data and identify business characteristics correlated with recovery within selected time windows. The methodology addresses challenges that arise when data is imbalanced, and predictors are c...

Past disasters have consistently led to unequal housing recovery for different economic groups, in large part because of the difficulty to obtain funding for low-income groups. Current earthquake recovery models simplify the process of obtaining funding for homeowners to rebuild after earthquakes. Therefore, current models do not fully capture disp...

Large scale disasters such as earthquakes can cause significant damage to the housing stock in a community. Insurance plays an important role in market-driven post-disaster housing recovery. However, insurance premiums are often defined based on costs defined before a disaster. Thus, reconstruction costs increase due to an imbalanced demand for ser...

Modern research often involves the collection or analysis of data and the use of specialized computer algorithms. Traditional text articles thus provide only partial documentation of a research study. Readers have limited ability to reproduce or utilize work if the source data are not available or if it relies on an algorithm that is described, but...

The Adaptive Regional Input-Output (ARIO) model is popular for quantifying indirect economic losses, which stem from business and supply chain interruption. However, refining this model to study new contexts is challenging in its basic form due to low-resolution modeling of behavioral parameters and temporally static reconstruction rates. This pape...

Post-disaster housing recovery models increase our understanding of recovery dynamics, vulnerable populations, and how people are affected by the direct losses that disasters create. Past recovery models have focused on single-family owner-occupied housing, while empirical evidence shows that rental units and multi-family housing are disadvantaged...

In the US, Presidential Major Disaster Declarations are a key factor to determine the availability of federal grants and low interest to support housing recovery. Without a Presidential Declaration, uninsured, lower-income disaster-struck households may be forced into large amounts of debt to cover home repair costs. In the long term, paying off th...

In the United States, assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) plays an essential role in supporting the postdisaster recovery of states with unmet housing needs. HUD requires data on unmet needs to appropriate recovery funds. Ground truth data are not available for months after a disaster, however, so HUD uses a simpli...

Residential damage from major disasters often displaces local residents out of their homes and into temporary housing. Out-of-town contractors assisting in post-disaster housing reconstruction also need housing, creating additional pressure on the local housing stock. Communities should thus prepare for a surge in temporary housing demand to minimi...

Effective recovery from future disasters requires careful planning today. At present, pre-planning focuses largely on reducing immediate losses, with less emphasis on actions to improve the recovery process. When long-term recovery is accounted for, this is done by reviewing past disasters in other communities. While this is valuable, it cannot inc...

Residential damage from major disasters often displaces residents out of their homes and into temporary housing. Communities tend to rely on out-of-town contractors for post-disaster housing recovery, and these contractors also need temporary housing. The conflicting housing needs from the displaced residents and out-of-town contractors create pres...

Recent disasters have shown that income plays a central role in determining the capacity of impacted households to cope with the shock and recover from it. Researchers often rely on random sampling to generate synthetic household income from aggregated Census data. This conventional approach imposes limitations towards proposing realistic policies....

Post-disaster housing recovery of rental units differs greatly from that of owner-occupied. There are fewer avenues for funding the repair of rental property. Moreover, if the landlord's home is damaged by the disaster they will likely prioritize the repairs of their home, further delaying the repair of rental units. Existing housing recovery model...

Residential damage from major disasters often displaces local residents out of their homes and into temporary housing. Out-of-town contractors assisting in post-disaster housing recovery also need housing, creating additional pressure on the local housing stock. Communities should thus prepare for a surge in temporary housing demand to minimize the...

Past disasters have consistently led to unequal housing recovery for different economic groups, in large part, because of the difficulty of obtaining funding for low-income groups. Current earthquake recovery models simplify the financing process for homeowners to rebuild after earthquakes, and in consequence, cannot fully capture disparities in th...

American Community Survey data are used to build logistic regression models that predict the capacity of owner households to finance the post-earthquake repair of their homes. Having high income and a paid mortgage are used as proxies for the ease of access to financing. We find that households with limited knowledge of English and those with elder...

A methodology is presented to combine the synthetic minority over-sampling technique and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator to analyze survey data and identify business characteristics correlated with recovery within selected time windows. The methodology addresses challenges that arise when data is imbalanced, and predictors are c...

This report is a product of the NHERI SimCenter under the auspices of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). It provides an overview and review of simulation requirements and software tools for natural hazards engineering (NHE) of the built environment. The simulations discussed in this report are an essential component of research to address...

A framework of computer models for simulating the competition for scarce resources during post-earthquake housing recovery is presented in this paper. The effects of this competition are investigated considering the speed of recovery for the overall community, as well as for selected socioeconomic groups. A case study involving the housing recovery...

This paper introduces a framework to account for physical damage to infrastructure and household disaster preparedness in estimates of potable water needs after earthquakes. A case study is presented involving the water supply system to the city of San Francisco after a Mw=7.9 earthquake. Accounting for household preparedness helps identify regions...

The effect of constraints on the number of inspectors, engineers, contractors, and permit assessors on post-earthquake housing recovery is investigated in this paper. The influence of the number of workers in each category is evaluated independently. Additionally, the influence of joint scarcity of engineers and contractors is investigated. A case...

An agent-based object-oriented model for the fuel distribution network in coastal British Columbia in Canada is presented. Objects representing infrastructure components with varied attributes and behaviors are described together with objects representing transportation modes on land and on water. A novel feature of the modeling approach is its cap...

A framework of agent-based models for housing recovery is presented and used to investigate post-earthquake recovery in the City of Vancouver, Canada. Housing recovery is modeled for a portfolio of buildings, contrasting with the practice of assessing the reconstruction of buildings in isolation. Thus, the presented approach better captures the eff...

This paper addresses the statistical uncertainty in long-term fatigue damage in offshore structures due to the short-term simulation length used in time domain analysis of stresses. The paper focuses on steel risers applications. A new simulation-based estimator for the variance of the short-term fatigue damage is presented. The proposed estimator...

Coastal and island communities in British Columbia (BC) are highly dependent on maritime transportation to support their basic needs, such as fuel deliveries. Historically, coastal communities maintained substantial local caches of supplies; however, with the advance of integrated supply chains and more frequent scheduled maritime service, just-in-...

This paper addresses the problem of mitigating the risk of fuel shortage in coastal communities in British Columbia. In the aftermath of an earthquake the fuel supply chain may be compromised and communities may need to withstand a certain period of time without receiving new fuel shipments. On the one hand, maintaining high reserves assures maximu...

In this work we propose two estimators for the variance of the short-term fatigue damage with the intent of mitigating the computational cost involved in obtaining a better description of the statistics of this variable, what is required for employing a reliability-based design approach for riser fatigue designs. These estimators are based on a var...

Palavras-chave: Interação fluido-estrutura; Método dos Elementos Finitos; Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics. Introdução Nas últimas três décadas esforços significativos têm sido aplicados para analisar numericamente problemas de interação fluido-estrutura. O termo " interação fluido-estrutura " refere-se tanto a ação de fluidos em estruturas que os c...

O emprego de polímeros reforçados com fibras enquanto material de Engenharia Civil é recen conhecimento do seu comportamento em longo prazo frente à ação das intempéries; sendo assim, é de fundamental importância compreender os fenômenos e mecanismos de degradação envolvidos. Neste contexto, propõe se a confecção de uma câmara de envelhecimento ace...