A Simulation and Visualization Environment for Spatiotemporal Disaster Risk Assessments of Network Infrastructures

Abstract

Emerging methodologies for risk assessments of civil infrastructure networks require the coupling of several spatiotemporal models that need to be executed multiple times with varying parametrizations to account for model uncertainty and to investigate “what-if” scenarios. These requirements led to the development of a software environment to support the simulation process and the visual analysis of its results. The simulation engine component of the environment makes it possible to define, couple, and execute models. An embedded infrastructure model facilitates the development of functionality to estimate and aggregate capacity measures of single objects affected by multiple hazards. The simulation manager component can be used to execute multiple instances of the simulation engine conveniently with varying parametrizations. The included visualization tool provides two complementary views. The ensemble view can be used to analyze the data at a highly aggregated level with information visualization techniques and the simulation view can be used to investigate simulations in greater detail via an interactive map window and a state dependency graph. The software environment is used in a risk assessment for the region of Chur, Switzerland, which comprises the simulation of multiple natural hazard scenarios that lead to impaired transport infrastructure capacities and thus to disrupted traffic flows.

Stress tests for a road network using fragility functions and functional capacity loss functions

“…For those interested in alternate visualizations of comparisons between the modeling results obtained when using 50-percentile fragility and functional capacity loss functions and the results obtained when using 95-percentile functions, please see the works of Heitzler, Lam [42] and Heitzler, Lam [43].…”

Review of the state of practice in geovisualization in the geosciences

“…The simulations can be interactive or static and have a variety of applications. GIS-based 3D visualizations have been used for mapping alluvial sites, modelling elevation and topography, measuring landslide vulnerability, and mapping water depth (Masse and Christophe, 2015;Heitzler et al, 2017a;Mossa et al, 2019;Wahyudi et al, 2020;Ahmed, Mahmud, and Tuya, 2021). These techniques using GIS have demonstrated that 3D visualizations can provide new insight alongside their 2D counterparts (Mossa et al, 2019), can provide additional geographic data, and model virtual representations of real events (Wahyudi et al, 2020).…”

Estimating the risk related to networks: a methodology and an application on a road network

“…Furthermore, details about the aggregation of these losses for the network are presented by Heitzler et al (2018).…”

“…Each module comprised distinct execution instructions, and required certain input data to be properly executed. Such input data may consist of parameters for the models, static input data (e.g., location of mudflows, extent of the road network) or even states of models originating from other modules (e.g., to determine the damaged objects, the water extent from a flood model is needed) as illustrated by Heitzler et al (2018).…”