Quantification of disaster resilience in civil engineering: A review

Abstract

Resistance to unexpected disasters and rapid post-disaster recovery (i.e., disaster resilience) of cities are extremely necessary owing to the concentrated risk of urbanization. Resilience quantification can adequately reflect the capacity of a city to withstand disasters. Many existing studies have focused on and proposed several frameworks on the quantitative measures of disaster resilience, and the corresponding research objects include different types of disasters (e.g., earthquake, hurricane, flood, and fire), various domains (e.g., engineering, social, and economic), and multiple levels (e.g., city, community, and building). Among these research objects, studies on seismic resilience in civil engineering are relatively comprehensive. Specifically, studies on resilience in civil engineering have paid significant attention to the dynamics of engineering facilities and the engineering-related social and economic functions, including city-scale engineering, social, and economic functionalities, and essential functionalities of building, transportation, lifeline, and nonphysical subsystems of a city. Consequently, based on the review of resilience studies carried out in recent years, the framework and specifications for the quantification of disaster resilience of civil engineering systems subjected to earthquakes and other unexpected disasters are elaborated. Methods of disaster resilience assessment of cities and the corresponding subsystems are discussed. Furthermore, several case studies are reviewed, and resilience limit-state analyses of communities and buildings are performed.

Keywords

• Resilience quantification in civil engineering
• Urban system
• Infrastructure and distributed network
• Single structure
• Resilience limit state