###Direct Multi-Hazard Consequence-Based Design of Buildings
Project ID: 2228bd1174 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Engineering
UCL Lead department: Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR)
Lead Supervisor: Roberto Gentile
Project Summary:
In 2021, natural hazards caused 10’500 deaths and 252B US$ losses . Such numbers will increase in the future due to (often-uncontrolled) urbanisation and exacerbation of climate-related hazards. Most of this future risk involves yet-to-be-built assets, among which residential buildings constitute a relevant share. There is an opportunity to use risk-targeted design approaches to invert the above trend. Performance-based earthquake engineering allows calculating consequences (e.g., deaths, dollars, downtime) for building configurations (including structural and non-structural components), using time-consuming numerical analyses involving several ground-motion excitations. Since this non-linear assessment formula cannot be inverted, it is used iteratively to design new buildings (i.e., obtaining a building configuration consistent with a target level of consequence). Using machine learning and surrogate modelling, the supervisor developed “Direct Loss Based Design (DLBD)”, which allows designing buildings to achieve a target economic loss for a site-specific seismic hazard. The procedure is “direct” because it does not require design iterations, thus enabling design in the engineering practice. DLBD is currently limited to earthquakes, and it can only target economic losses. The candidate will develop DLBD for flooding using conventional (e.g., economic loss) and people-centred (e.g., human displacement) consequence metrics. This involves: a review of the state-of-the-art flood risk assessment of buildings; a sensitivity analysis to identify the most influential parameters; machine-learning techniques to surrogate the building configuration-to-consequence mapping (the core of flood DLBD). To include climate change effects on the flood severity/yearly rate during the building design lifetime, a lifecycle approach will be used. Finally, flood DLBD will be combined with the existing seismic DLBD to obtain “direct multi-hazard consequence-based design”. The ideal candidate for this project has a master’s degree in earthquake engineering and a reasonable coding level. Proficiency in probabilistic risk analysis is desirable but not essential.