📰 Simulate an earthquake crisis in the city including human behavior

Throughout history, devastating earthquakes have destroyed cities around the world. Let us quote for example the earthquake of Lisbon in Portugal in 1755 which made more than 20,000 victims, the earthquake of Bam in Iran in 2003 which destroyed most of the buildings of the city (A city is an urban unit (a “human settlement” for…)or more recently that of Port-au-Prince in Haiti in 2010 which left more than one million (One million (1,000,000) is the natural number following nine hundred and ninety-nine…) of homeless people. Faced with this natural phenomenon that is both unpredictable and destructive (In object-oriented programming, the destructor of a class is a thrown method…)how can scientists contribute to the reduction of seismic risk in cities?

Thanks to technological and scientific advances and the rise ofartificial intelligence (Artificial intelligence or cognitive computing is the “finding of means…), we are now able to simulate on a fine scale the occurrence of a seismic crisis in an urban environment. From a multi-agent model, it is possible to recreate the actions and interactions between animated agents (individuals or emergency services) and non-animated agents (buildings or debris). By including human behavior in these simulations, they can be used by scientists to improve seismic risk assessment and by crisis management actors to adapt urban development policies and development plans. prevention (Prevention is an attitude and/or the set of measures to be taken to avoid…) of disasters.

The reproduction of a environment (The environment is everything that surrounds us. It is all the natural elements and…) virtual seismic crisis requires an approach holistic (Holism (from the Greek ολoς (holos): whole) is a system of thought…) incorporating spatio-temporal descriptions, both realistic and robust, of the systems physical (Physics (from the Greek φυσις, nature) is etymologically the…), urban and social. From point (graphics) of seen (Sight is the sense that allows to observe and analyze the environment through reception and…) physics, the behavior of soils and buildings in the face of earthquakes are integrated by estimating the damage building by building as well as the debris generated for different seismic scenarios. From the social point of view, the responses of individuals to earthquakes are modeled as well as the contextual factors that can influence them, such as the person’s age and gender. This involves the collection and analysis of data (In information technology (IT), data is an elementary description, often…) heterogeneous (in situ data, social surveys, satellite images) requiring know-how interdisciplinary (Interdisciplinary work incorporates concepts from different disciplines.) combining the sciences of Earth (Earth is the third planet in the Solar System in order of distance…)social sciences andcomputer science (IT – contraction of information and automatic – is the domain…).

In the study, the interest was brought to the city of Beirut, capital city (A capital (from the Latin caput, capitis, head) is a city where the powers sit,…) from Lebanon. One country (Country comes from the Latin pagus which designated a territorial and tribal subdivision of extent…) with moderate seismicity which is at the heart of a system of faults capable of generating earthquakes of magnitude greater than 7 as evidenced by the earthquakes of 551 and 1202. Although Beirut has not experienced a major earthquake recently, theblast (An explosion is the rapid transformation of one material into another material having a…) sudden and brutal on August 4, 2020 at the port of Beirut was perceived as an earthquake by part of the population. The survey conducted on the behavior adopted in the face of the explosion revealed the poor knowledge of the population of “places of refuge” in the event of an emergency and the strong propensity to seek and join family members.

These behaviors were integrated into pedestrian evacuation simulations during an seismic crisis in Beirut to analyze the safety of individuals, defined as taking refuge in an open space. These simulations have shown that the essential element for the safety of individuals is the urban form and the distribution of open spaces in terms of size and proximity to frequented places. However, debris and human behavior are aggravating factors for the safety of populations that should not be overlooked!