Papers by Alessandro Cardoni
International journal of disaster risk reduction, 2021
Over the last decade, the topic of regional resilience has drawn the attention of public authorit... more Over the last decade, the topic of regional resilience has drawn the attention of public authorities due to the increasing number of natural disasters. The absence of a practical and concrete methodology makes it extremely difficult to evaluate resilience at the regional scale, which involves several concepts such as economics, social sciences, environment, etc. This paper proposes an indicator-based approach to assess the resilience assessment of Italian regions. A set of twelve indicators has been selected among publicly available census data. A time window of ten years was considered in the analysis. Three different resilience indexes were calculated for each region. The first is an overall measure of resilience, while the other two represent resilience during the emergency and the restoration phase following a disaster. Results highlight fundamental aspects that have a higher impact on regional resilience and can be used by decision-makers to effectively allocate resources. The ...
Historical heritage represent a crucial aspect for societies and therefore it should be preserved... more Historical heritage represent a crucial aspect for societies and therefore it should be preserved from natural disasters such as earthquake. Base isolation systems are widely used to mitigate the horizontal effects of strong ground motions on important buildings and bridges, but there are also interesting applications on statues. However, such systems are characterized by properties that are quite different from the ones that belong to traditional civil structures. For this reason, national and international regulations are not exhaustive and actual dynamics of the system should be studied through numerical and experimental methods. Starting from analytical formulations, the paper investigates the sliding and rocking motion in details, being the typical one of statues under seismic loads. The presented numerical model describes the problem and is an alternative to the analytical formulation to perform several analyses automatically. In addition, it allows running parametric analyses...
Infrastructure systems are crucial for the development of communities because they provide essent... more Infrastructure systems are crucial for the development of communities because they provide essential services to the habitants. Here we focus on the transportation network, which is designed to provide a continuous service to the community. Due to its decisive role in the economy, governments and policy makers have been investing in developing strategies to increase the resilience of this kind of infrastructure against disruptive events. In the literature, several methods to evaluate networks’ reliability and resilience can be found. The applicability of these methods is limited to small networks due to the computational complexities. In this paper, the case of city-scale road transportation networks is tackled. The case study considered in this work is the transportation network of a virtual, city called ‘Ideal City’. First, the road map of the city is transformed into an undirected graph with 15012 nodes and 19614 edges. A non-random gradual removal of the edges has been applied until the network’s failure point is reached. The edge removal process is related to the failure probabilities of the edges when the network is exposed to a certain hazard. In fact, the effect of hazards on the transportation network is not direct. The hazard exposes the building structures on the road sides to a failure risk. These structures if collapsed would cause the adjacent roads to be blocked and thus lose functionality due to the debris falling from the structures. For this purpose, a building infrastructure is modeled and the relationship between the level of damage of building and the amount of debris falling on the adjacent roads is developed. A Monte Carlo approach is used to generate failure permutations of edges considering their failure probabilities. The network
The Italian school buildings asset consists of over 40,000 units. The most (about 60%) were built... more The Italian school buildings asset consists of over 40,000 units. The most (about 60%) were built before the introduction of the national standard on school buildings and constructions in seismic areas. The opportunity to define a methodology to assess the condition of an infrastructure before and after a seismic event is therefore of particular importance, both for a screening of the existing assets and for the damage assessment after the event. Before the event, it may allow to establish priorities of intervention in the field of seismic risk reduction. Furthermore, after the event, it can be crucial to recover the infrastructure. The proposed BIM-based (Building Information Modelling)approach includes static and dynamic non-destructive testing and structural finite element analysis of the existing building. Guidelines for BIM modeling will be drawn up in order to give indications to BIM modelers and to obtain a BIM model that can be straightforward used for dynamic structural ana...
This work aims at establishing laboratory requirements and testing conditions in order to underst... more This work aims at establishing laboratory requirements and testing conditions in order to understand the physical and emotional stability of people during a ground shaking. Several individuals with different human characteristics (gender, age, height, etc.) are considered in the test. Two different laboratory setups are presented. A position device (Kinect) and video targetless tracking algorithm has been used to collect the human body position during the shaking. A two and a three dimensional shaking tables are used to generate artificial earthquakes with different frequency bands. In addition, a well detailed virtual reality setting is applied to the testing site in order to illustrate the real environment. During the experiment, a special attention has been given to the factor of "surprise", which is necessary to ensure a natural reaction of the individuals. The result of the experiment proved common behaviors among the individual samples during the shaking. This work is considered a first step towards a large test campaign, which is necessary to obtain comprehensive statistics on this topic.
Infrastructure systems are crucial for the development of communities as they provide essential s... more Infrastructure systems are crucial for the development of communities as they provide essential services to the habitants. To improve the resilience of such systems, their intrinsic properties need to be understood and their resilience state needs be identified. In the literature, several methods to evaluate networks’ reliability and resilience can be found. However, the applicability of these methods is restricted to small-size networks due to several computational limitations. In this paper, the case of large scale networks is tackled. The transportation network of a virtual city is considered as a case study. First, the road map of the city is transformed into an undirected graph. A random removal of the roads is applied until the network’s failure point is reached. The network reliability is then calculated using the Destruction Spectrum (D-spectrum) approach. A Monte Carlo approach has been developed to generate failure permutations, which are necessary for the evaluation of th...
The capacity of a community to react and resist to an emergency situation is strictly related to ... more The capacity of a community to react and resist to an emergency situation is strictly related to the proper functioning of its own infrastructure systems. This paper proposes a simulation oriented approach to evaluate the resilience of large scale water distribution networks. The case study used in this research is the water network of a large scale virtual city. The water network is modeled using the software EPANET 2.0 with the help of an integrated Matlab toolbox. The network consists of 16000 junctions and 19000 water pipes buried under the road network of the city. A series of earthquake scenarios is applied to the water network and the damage induced by the earthquakes has been determined using fragility function. The failure of the system occurs when the water flow and the water pressure go below a certain threshold. The resilience of the network is then evaluated using two indices: (1) the number of users without water, (2) the drop in the total water supply. 1 Department of...
Reinforced concrete structural components such as beams are subject during their service life to ... more Reinforced concrete structural components such as beams are subject during their service life to different loading conditions that may affect their durability and efficiency. This can reduce the safety level of the structure over time until it degrades completely and reaches its ultimate limit state. In particular, cracking conditions due to tensile conditions can be developed leading to the exposure of the steel reinforcements to the aggression of external agents, such as chlorides. Being able to monitor the development and the evolution of cracking is crucial and this research is aimed at this purpose. In particular, laboratory tests have been performed on reinforced concrete beams equipped with distributed fiber optics sensors to monitor the state of cracking. This technology has been selected because its inherent accuracy and low noise. Furthermore, since technology relies of optical signals, the sensors are not affected by electrical and magnetic noise. They are also resistant ...
Advances in Engineering Materials, Structures and Systems: Innovations, Mechanics and Applications
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (COMPDYN 2015), 2017
The recent thrust, from both the scientists and policy makers, to increase community resilience i... more The recent thrust, from both the scientists and policy makers, to increase community resilience identifies lifelines as one of the most important field to intervene on. Lifelines are critical infrastructures which are highly interdependent to each other, and this interdependency can lead to cascading effects when a failure occurs. For this reason the interdependencies should be analyzed also taking into account the time effect. The aim of this paper is to introduce a suitable method for modeling the interdependencies of lifelines even in emergency situations, when the networks change over time. The methodology proposed relies on the Input-output Inoperability Model which has been modified according to the criteria of temporal networks. The critical infrastructures are modeled as graphs and the failure of the elements of the network propagates according to determined rules. Graphs are then interconnected in order to simulate the cascading effects. The Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster has been studied, as it is one of the most complete example of failure due to interdependencies and temporal effects. Results show that the developed methodology applied to a detailed model of the nuclear power plant is able to effectively describe the evolving situation.
IABMAS 9th International Conference on Bridge Maintenance, Safety and Management, 2018
To improve the resilience of critical infrastructure systems, their intrinsic properties need to ... more To improve the resilience of critical infrastructure systems, their intrinsic properties need to be understood and their resilience state needs be identified. In the literature, several methods to evaluate networks’ reliability and resilience can be found. However, the applicability of these methods is usually restricted to small-size net-works. In this paper, the transportation network of a large-scale virtual city is considered as a case study. A random removal of the roads is applied simulating the network’s failure. The network reliability is then calcu-lated using the Destruction Spectrum (D-spectrum) method and a Monte Carlo approach has been developed to generate failure permutations that are necessary for the evaluation of the D-spectrum se. In addition, the Birnbaum Importance Measure (BIM) has been adopted in this study to determine the importance of the net-work’s components. The methodology adopted in this study can be also extended to all network-based sys-tems. The pap...
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Abstract The complexity of large-scale power networks, together with their increasing ageing and ... more Abstract The complexity of large-scale power networks, together with their increasing ageing and obsolete design, implies an intrinsic fragility with respect to natural disasters, such as strong earthquakes. The investigation of the interdependencies among different critical infrastructures is fundamental to prevent possible cascading effects and frequent unserviceability. This paper aims at studying the effects of a seismic event on a large-scale virtual city, implicitly modeling the interdependency between the buildings and the electric distribution network. A consistent methodology to assess the resilience of the urban electric power distribution system is herein introduced and validated. Furthermore, a new resilience index is also introduced and compared to others available in the literature. The index is able to properly describe the network resilience, by taking into account aspects such as redundancy and resourcefulness. The developed methodology allows to investigate the impact of extreme events on the electric power distribution system also in case of scarce input data.
Dynamics of structures has been deeply investigated in recent years through shaking table tests l... more Dynamics of structures has been deeply investigated in recent years through shaking table tests leading to innovative solutions in structural design, such as active and passive systems to mitigate seismic loads. With the aim of supporting the research in the field of resilience and emergency management after earthquakes, this paper presents the construction of a multi modular platform and its applications in earthquake engineering. The platform has been developed entirely by undergraduate students at Politecnico di Torino in Italy within a specific educational program. The project is aimed at testing scaled models of different structures to highlight specific response characteristics and involve students in proactive learning during dynamics and seismic courses. A specific procedure has been also planned in order to explore human body motions and behavior under real ground motions and floor response records as well as artificial input signals. Virtual reality is then introduced as a...
Sustainable Cities and Society
Structural Health Monitoring 2019
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (COMPDYN 2015)
The problem of emergency evacuation of public buildings intended to accommodate large numbers of ... more The problem of emergency evacuation of public buildings intended to accommodate large numbers of people is critical. Modern technologies such as the use of numerical simulations, virtual and augmented reality, and Agent Based models represent an opportunity to study behaviors that are difficult to reproduce in real life (e.g. explosions and fires emergencies). This may allow to improve new and existing structures with respect to such risks and therefore to improve the resilience of modern communities. In this paper, the problem of emergency fire evacuation for an existing school in the hinterland of Milan is studied. A virtual reality-based system for the simulation of fire emergency response will be developed starting from the BIM model and then moving on to a platform that ensures the interaction between human and the virtual simulation environment. The spreading of the flames and smoke is based on fire numerical simulation using computation fluid dynamic (CDF) software. Such simulation method may reproduce realistic fire processes and illustrate smoke movement by describing the configuration of fuel, ventilation, and fire source. The verification of the infrastructure response and the subsequent modification for a better emergency response represent the expected results of the research.
Sustainable Cities and Society
PESDES 2017 International Workshop on Performance-Based Seismic Design of Structures , 2017
Infrastructure systems are crucial for the development of communities as they provide essential s... more Infrastructure systems are crucial for the development of communities as they provide essential services to the habitants. To improve the resilience of such systems, their intrinsic properties need to be understood and their resilience state needs be identified. In the literature, several methods to evaluate networks' reliability and resilience can be found. However, the applicability of these methods is restricted to small-size networks due to several computational limitations. In this paper, the case of large scale networks is tackled. The transportation network of a virtual city is considered as a case study. First, the road map of the city is transformed into an undirected graph. A random removal of the roads is applied until the network's failure point is reached. The network reliability is then calculated using the Destruction Spectrum (D-spectrum) approach. A Monte Carlo approach has been developed to generate failure permutations, which are necessary for the evaluation of the D-spectrum set. In addition, the Birnbaum Importance Measure (BIM) has been adopted in this study to determine the importance of the network's components. Due to the large size of the network, several computational problems have been faced. To solve the problems, two coding algorithms have been introduced in the paper to evaluate both the reliability and the BIM indexes for large scale networks. The analysis concept adopted in this study is applicable to all network-based systems such as water, gas, transportation, etc.
Eleventh U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering, 2018
The capacity of a community to react and resist to an emergency situation is strictly related to ... more The capacity of a community to react and resist to an emergency situation is strictly related to the proper functioning of its own infrastructure systems. This paper proposes a simulation oriented approach to evaluate the resilience of large scale water distribution networks. The case study used in this research is the water network of a large scale virtual city. The water network is modeled using the software EPANET 2.0 with the help of an integrated Matlab toolbox. The network consists of 16000 junctions and 19000 water pipes buried under the road network of the city. A series of earthquake scenarios is applied to the water network and the damage induced by the earthquakes has been determined using fragility function. The failure of the system occurs when the water flow and the water pressure go below a certain threshold. The resilience of the network is then evaluated using two indices: (1) the number of users without water, (2) the drop in the total water supply.
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Papers by Alessandro Cardoni