Beyond tsunami fragility functions: experimental assessment for building damage estimation.

Tsunami fragility functions (TFF) are statistical models that relate a tsunami intensity measure to a given building damage state, expressed as cumulative probability. Advances in computational and data retrieval speeds, coupled with novel deep learning applications to disaster science, have shifted research focus away from statistical estimators. TFFs offer a "disaster signature" with comparative value, though these models are seldom applied to generate damage estimates. With applicability in mind, we challenge this notion and investigate a portion of TFF literature, selecting three TFFs and two application methodologies to generate a building damage estimation baseline. Further, we propose a simple machine learning method, trained on physical parameters inspired by, but expanded beyond, TFF intensity measures. We test these three methods on the 2011 Ishinomaki dataset after the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in both binary and multi-class cases. We explore: (1) the quality of building damage estimation using TFF application methods; (2) whether TFF can generalize to out-of-domain building damage datasets; (3) a novel machine learning approach to perform the same task. Our findings suggest that: both TFF methods and our model have the potential to achieve good binary results; TFF methods struggle with multiple classes and out-of-domain tasks, while our proposed method appears to generalize better.

Model-based analysis of multi-UAV path planning for surveying postdisaster building damage.

Emergency responders require accurate and comprehensive data to make informed decisions. Moreover, the data should be acquired and analyzed swiftly to ensure an efficient response. One of the tasks at hand post-disaster is damage assessment within the impacted areas. In particular, building damage should be assessed to account for possible casualties, and displaced populations, to estimate long-term shelter capacities, and to assess the damage to services that depend on essential infrastructure (e.g. hospitals, schools, etc.). Remote sensing techniques, including satellite imagery, can be used to gathering such information so that the overall damage can be assessed. However, specific points of interest among the damaged buildings need higher resolution images and detailed information to assess the damage situation. These areas can be further assessed through unmanned aerial vehicles and 3D model reconstruction. This paper presents a multi-UAV coverage path planning method for the 3D reconstruction of postdisaster damaged buildings. The methodology has been implemented in NetLogo3D, a multi-agent model environment, and tested in a virtual built environment in Unity3D. The proposed method generates camera location points surrounding targeted damaged buildings. These camera location points are filtered to avoid collision and then sorted using the K-means or the Fuzzy C-means methods. After clustering camera location points and allocating these to each UAV unit, a route optimization process is conducted as a multiple traveling salesman problem. Final corrections are made to paths to avoid obstacles and give a resulting path for each UAV that balances the flight distance and time. The paper presents the details of the model and methodologies, and an examination of the texture resolution obtained from the proposed method and the conventional overhead flight with the nadir-looking method used in 3D mappings. The algorithm outperforms the conventional method in terms of the quality of the generated 3D model.