Agent-Based Risk Assessment and Mitigation for Urban Public Infrastructure

The challenge of risk management is to reduce the harm that disasters cause to society, economy, and the lives of individuals and communities by decreasing uncertainty, calculating and comparing costs and benefits, and managing resources. This must often be accomplished more extensively and much faster than it is possible by traditional problem solving methods. Recently, intelligent agents have more and more been used in a variety of fields, as some scientists even consider them a new computational paradigm based on autonomy and social interactions. Agent-based systems can provide additional capabilities to help people understand the dynamic realities of a disaster more clearly by simulations of risk scenarios and can allow them to make better decisions more quickly by providing intelligent support for decision making. By using GIS-based visualization of geospatial data, the knowledge on structural seismic vulnerability for urban infrastructure can be further improved. In this way, stakeholders can increase the quality of their decisions for the management of possible emerging crises and/or for planning the rehabilitation programs. Modeling, simulation, and analysis scenarios based on linear or non-linear dynamic procedures are described, with applications to some different classes of buildings models from the Iaşi municipality, the second largest city of Romania. A set of artificial intelligence methods are used as tools for the awareness and monitoring of seismic effects taking into account possible future disasters.