$2.5M to launch a new era in natural hazards engineering

October 27, 2016
Contact:
  • umichnews@umich.edu

ANN ARBOR—Advancing ‘natural hazards engineering’ and disaster science is the goal of a new $2.5 million project at the University of Michigan. It’s funded by the National Science Foundation.

Major natural disasters disrupt nearly all aspects of life, from the basics of food, clothing and shelter to transportation, communications and the economy. The U-M team is taking a new, holistic approach to studying natural disasters, integrating the work of researchers from fields as diverse as engineering, medicine, economics and social science into a single model that can take into account the interaction of the complex factors in play.

The researchers will build a broad set of standards for studying natural disasters, enabling researchers from many different fields to seamlessly collaborate on predictive computational models. The hope is that these new models will result in a more comprehensive understanding of the effects of disasters, and therefore the policies, infrastructure design, and behaviors that will minimize damage.

“Disasters affect so many people worldwide, there is a lot we can do to reduce loss of life and damage to our civil infrastructure,” said Sherif El-Tawil, U-M professor of civil and environmental engineering and principal investigator on the project.

“Much of the current research is essentially niche studies, belonging in the field of the researchers. Our objective is to develop computational standards so that social scientists, engineers, economists, doctors, first responders and everyone else can produce simulators that interact together in a large, all-encompassing simulation of a disaster scenario. Think of it as the civilian equivalent of a war games simulator.”

The computational work will be done on U-M’s Flux high performance computing cluster, operated by Advanced Research Computing-Technology Services. El-Tawil said the computing ingredient is crucial to the success of the project.

“Developing this common computational language will allow completely new studies to occur,” he said. “Someone might look at the effects of an earthquake on a particular town and its citizens and then the subsequent effects of infectious diseases. With a common language, we can really examine the cascading and potentially out-of-control effects that occur during catastrophic events.”

Beyond developing the computational standards, they hope to create something like an app store through which researchers can share their simulation models and foster new collaborations and new areas of research.

The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering provided institutional backing for the grant, and MICDE faculty members El-Tawil and Kamat will coordinate the project.

“This project illustrates the power of the type of interdisciplinary cooperation the institute fosters, as well as the utility and innovative potential of the university’s high performance computing resources,” said MICDE Director Krishna Garikipati, U-M professor of mechanical engineering and mathematics.

The group working on the project consists of six researchers from U-M and one from the University of Delaware. In addition to El-Tawil, the team includes: Jason McCormick, an earthquake engineering expert and U-M associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; Seymour Spence, a wind engineering expert and U-M assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering; and Benigno Aguirre, a social scientist at the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center who studies how people behave during catastrophes.

Developing the simulation techniques used in the project will be Vineet Kamat, U-M professor of civil and environmental engineering; Carol Menassa, U-M associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; and Atul Prakash, U-M professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

 

More information: