I-Corps: An Innovative Framework for High Resolution Quantitative Assessment of Flood Resiliency

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to provide technical services to homeowners, local municipalities, engineering and insurance companies to enhance community resilience and sustainability against multi-hazard events such as hurricane that can bring strong wind, storm surge and wide spread inundation. The proposed resilience technology contributes to a paradigm shift in practice from engineering design code methods to performance-based approach that considers structural resiliency concepts and quantifies property hazard risk and value over time. The in-house developed technology utilizes the hydrodynamic simulations to calculate the flood impacts and combines it with the structural and socioeconomic features of built environment. The multi-faceted tool will inform individuals, local municipalities, coastal building designers, increasing the performance and resiliency of this building stock and ensuring greater post-event community function, insurance companies underwriting flood insurances and calculating premiums. Progress and information to be gained through the I-Corps program, in interactions with hazard insurance and risk assessment companies as well as engineering and information service groups will enable our team to expedite the translation of the proposed technology to the market. The developed technologies will be scalable and broadly applicable to other hazard types and regions with potentials of expanding to at international markets.This I-Corps project aims to offer a comprehensive predictive tool that provides a pin-point quantitative assessment of the damage and resiliency scenarios of individual properties and up-scaling it to larger infrastructure cluster to introduce a new understanding of the community wide vulnerability considering available social and human capitals. The innovative and ground breaking aspect of this work is that this project for the first time consolidating hydrodynamic, structural and socioeconomic information through a massive big data campaign followed by interactive analysis to open a new window in understanding impacts of extreme events. Specifically, the intellectual merit of this approach resides in its (a) Holistic approach to performance-based design of building (b) Application of state-of-the-art data driven predictive models and advanced computational technologies in flood damage and resiliency assessment of buildings (c) High modularity in building design and prototyping process which supports expansion to other hazards and building types, and (d) Potential to create new knowledge regarding optimal multi-hazard building design. The approach provides comprehensive support to decision makers and designers by estimating building vulnerability and resiliency over construction property, operation and hazards, and by balancing competing objectives.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.