SBIR Phase I: Rapid Calculation of Earthquake Damage and Repair Costs for High-Performance Building Design

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is that structural engineers will be enabled to design high-performance buildings that have minimal damage in earthquakes. Using the software tool created in this project would fundamentally change the way in which a structural engineer develops the initial design for a building. By enabling engineers to enhance their understanding of building performance, they will be able to design buildings for higher seismic performance and will thus improve the resilience of buildings in future earthquakes. There is a large potential new market for this software, as it can eventually be used by every one of the approximately 10,000 structural engineers designing buildings in the Western United States, and the tens of thousands of engineers working worldwide in regions with earthquake hazards. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop technology to rapidly estimate the structural behavior during an earthquake and also provide a rapid estimation of the inventory of components in a building. This rapid autopopulation will then enable efficient calculations that predict the damage, the repair costs, and the repair time for a building when it experiences an earthquake. The company's method for rapid estimation of structural responses will utilize principles of engineering mechanics, applied to estimating response of a structure whose properties are not fully specified. The method for rapid estimation of building contents will learn from users' updates to the company's initial predictions. The proposed statistical model will enable the company to study this question, and deploy a model that allows real-time and user-specific refinements in a scalable manner.