SBIR Phase II: Rapid Calculation of Earthquake Repair Costs for Pricing of Building Risk

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是，它将使我们称为风险定价者的一组客户（具体来说，金融公司的财产和意外保险承销商和抵押贷款银行家）能够从他们产品的定制定价中获利。他们可以通过使用本提案中开发的软件快速预测具有特定配置的建筑物的经济损失来做到这一点。然后，这些客户可以根据我们提供的精细分析来调整地震保险和抵押贷款条款的定价。除了为风险定价者提供明确的经济利益外，这种新的分析方法还将从根本上改变围绕建筑安全的市场力量和激励机制。如果建筑物的所有者被激励去提高其抗震性能（通过降低保险和抵押贷款成本），那么高性能建筑就会变得更有吸引力，这将鼓励设计更好的建筑。随着该公司的软件使建筑属性和财务成本之间的联系更加明确，社会将从更有效的资源分配中受益，最终导致社会弹性的增强。这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）第二阶段项目将开发算法和软件工具，为对地震造成的建筑物修复成本和关闭感兴趣的客户提供财务指导。为了完成其工具的开发，该公司将专注于校准统计模型，以预测各种建筑类型在遭受地震震动时的位移和加速度。该公司快速评估结构响应的方法利用了工程力学原理，但应用于学术研究不关注的领域（即，评估分析师不完全了解其特性的结构的响应）。确定的关键需求是校准结构响应的统计预测模型，该模型适用于保险和抵押银行市场中客户感兴趣的所有流行建筑类型（即轻框架木结构、钢结构、混凝土结构、混凝土倾斜）。该公司还将开发包含保险合同条件（如免赔额和限额）的损失度量和计算输出，以便将计算与客户的工作流程联系起来。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is that it will enable a group of customers we call Risk Pricers (specifically, property and casualty insurance underwriters and mortgage bankers in financial firms) to profit from tailoring pricing on their products. They can do this by rapidly predicting financial losses for buildings having specific configurations, using the software developed in this proposal. These customers can then tailor pricing of earthquake insurance and mortgage terms based on refined analyses that we facilitate. Besides offering a clear financial benefit to Risk Pricers, this new analysis approach will also fundamentally change market forces and incentives around building safety. If a building's owner is incentivized to improve its earthquake performance (via lower insurance and mortgage costs), then high-performance buildings become more appealing and this will encourage design of better buildings. As the company's software makes more explicit the links between building properties and financial costs, society will benefit from more efficient resource allocation, ultimately leading to increased societal resilience.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop algorithms and software tools that provide financial guidance to customers interested in repair costs and closures of buildings due to earthquakes. To complete the development of its tool, the company will focus on calibrating statistical models to predict displacements and accelerations in a wide range of building types, when they are subjected to earthquake shaking. The company's method for rapid estimation of structural responses utilizes principles of engineering mechanics, but applied in a domain where academic research does not focus (i.e., estimating response of a structure whose properties are not fully known to the analyst). The key identified need is to calibrate a statistical predictive model for the response of a structure that is effective over all popular construction types of interest to customers in the insurance and mortgage banking markets (i.e., light frame wood, steel, concrete, concrete tilt-up). The company will also develop loss metric and calculation outputs that incorporate insurance contract conditions such as deductibles and limits, in order to link the calculations to customers' workflows.