Post-Crisis Damage and Needs Assessment of Buildings for Response, Reconstruction and Recovery Planning - Workshop

Introduction to the Workshop

Buildings, both critical and conventional ones, are often among the main facilities damaged in either a natural or a manmade disaster. In the unfortunate events of an earthquake or an explosion the above facilities may exceed their functional or structural limits and this can be visible. On the other hand, they can also suffer enormous damage to their capacity without producing any apparent visible signs. Such damage, for instance, in the case of an earthquake, can render the facility incapable of surviving consecutive aftershocks. These aftershocks take place within few hours of the earthquake and can have an intensity of up to 90% of the original earthquake intensity. The post-crisis damage assessment process for constructed facilities is based mainly on on-site inspection by experienced engineers. When the visible signs of damage are not of the kind that points to a definitive damage or non-damage state, further analysis is necessary. The problem is compounded by the shortage of experienced inspectors and the inevitable time delay caused by an in-depth structural analysis during which time a conservative position has to be taken and the facility stays closed. This is extremely painful in the case of critical buildings, such as, for instance, buildings necessary for the disaster planning and management (e.g., the Ministry of the Interior or civil protection agencies), or building that serve the affected population such as hospitals, police and fire stations, schools, etc.

The objective of this workshop is to discuss the importance and trends of structural and non-structural assessment techniques and methods (civil structural health monitoring) applied in critical or conventional buildings as a means to avoid partial and total collapses when disastrous incidents take place (e.g. earthquakes, explosions, etc.). Such assessments include - but not limited to – the deployment of novel monitoring sensor networks (in-building, environmental and aerial sensors) in conjunction to information and disaster management systems that provide the stakeholders rapidly with an evaluation of the magnitude of the disaster. Additionally, the assessment reports generated drive response, reconstruction and recovery planning efforts towards saving lives, restoring functionalities and building back better.

Submissions

We invite submissions in the form of research and position papers, related to the workshop topics listed below. Papers should be formatted using the same template as ISCRAM short papers (available from the Call for Papers).

Submissions deadlines: April 7th, 2017

Acceptance notification: April 14th, 2017

Submit your paper to
pdnab3rp-iscram2017@lists.iccs.gr
(before April 7th, 2017)

Workshop Topics

• Structural and non-structural engineering
• Emergency management and planning
• Training and simulations
• Collaboration and integration
• Response and health monitoring of structures
• Lessons from recent earthquakes and explosions
• Practice case studies
• Economic implications of seismic/terrorist attacks risk and resilience
• Damage avoidance design

Presenters Recruitment

The workshop is driven by the following projects:

1. RECONASS - Reconstruction and REcovery Planning: Rapid and Continuously Updated COnstruction Damage, and Related Needs ASSessment

   Project’s Goal: This work provides a monitoring system for constructed facilities that produces a near real time, reliable, and continuously updated assessment of the structural condition of the monitored facilities after a disaster, with enough detail to be useful for early and full recovery planning. The above assessment is seamlessly integrated with automated, near real-time and continuously updated assessment of physical damage, loss of functionality, direct economic loss and needs of the monitored facilities and provides the required input for the prioritization of their repair.

   Consortium: RECONASS Project consortium is comprised of 10 partners (4 SMEs, 1 Civil Protection Agency and 5 research/academic) from 7 EU countries. The Project also features a wide end user group of >50 members including civil protection agencies, insurance companies, damage map and monitoring system providers and assessment experts.

2. NACHUS – Technological and Methodological Solutions for Integrated Wide Area Situation Awareness and Survivor Localization

   Project’s Goal: INACHUS aims to achieve a significant time reduction related to Urban Search and Rescue (USaR) phase by providing wide-area situation awareness solutions for improved detection and localisation of the trapped victims assisted by simulation tools for predicting structural failures and a holistic decision support mechanism incorporating operational procedures and resources of relevant actors.

   Consortium: INACHUS partnership has been carefully selected to form a balanced consortium regarding all aspects including R&D (8), public entities (3), large companies (3) and SMEs (6) from 9 EU member states and 2 associated countries.

Agenda Sunday May 21, 2017 — Room 0F03

08:00-09:00	Registration
09:00-09:10	Welcome & Introduction to the Workshop (Dr. Angelos Amditis, ICCS, INACHUS and RECONASS Project Coordinator, Workshop Chair)
09:10-09:30	“JRC+IFB Field Reporting Tool applied to Middle Italy earthquake event” Daniele Alberto Galliano, Scientific Project Officer, European Commission Joint Research Centre – JRC.E.1, Disaster Risk Management Unit Mr. Daniele A. Galliano, is an electronic engineer and works for the EC since 2007 as a developer of IT solutions for Crisis Management. This role includes the design and the implementation of facilities like Crisis Room (notably the one of the Department of Civil Protection of Haitian Republic in Port-au-Prince) and the technical responsibility of the European Crisis Management Laboratory.
09:30-09:50	“Using technology and the power of the crowd to improve emergency response” Mr. Tomer Kaplan, Senior Disaster Management Officer, Magen David Adom in Israel Mr. Tomer Kaplan is a senior disaster management officer at MDA since 2007. Mr. Kaplan teaches in Ben-Gurion University in the department of emergency medicine and he acts as Medical Supervisor of the southern region in Israel. Mr. Kaplan was deployed to Nepal following the earthquake in 2015 as a public health delegate for the Norwegian Red Cross.
09:50-10:10	“Civil Protection Operations – Gaps and Future Trends” Michael Markus, Building Monitoring Team – Safety and Security Officer, Federal Agency for Technical Relief - Technisches Hilfswerk (THW) Michael Markus holds a Diploma in Aerospace Engineering (University of Stuttgart) and was responsible for different research projects about disaster response and urban search and rescue at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology/University of Karlsruhe (I-LOV, CPC 461 “strong earthquakes”). He is member of the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief THW, where he is responsible for a building monitoring team for search and rescue operations and as safety and security officer. He is member of the THW FP7 RECONASS research team. His research interest includes building collapse classification, collapse modelling and user requirements.
10:10-10:30	“Earthquake Nepal, 2015 – A structural assessment: Examples & lessons learnt towards resilient buildings” Åke Solfeldt, Structural Engineer – Project Manager, WSP & Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency - Swedish International Fast Response Team, Urban Search And Rescue Mr. Åke Solfeldt is a Civil Engineer with 27 years of experience in the field of a structural engineering. He has worked for WSP since 2001. During 2008-2009, period of 18 months, he was stationed in Shanghai as an interface engineer for steel structures. During 2010-2013 he was the team leader and responsible engineer for the complete precast structure of Tele2 Arena in Stockholm. Since 1990 most of his projects have been buildings of different kinds. Since 2014 he is a volunteer for the MSB´s SWIFT USAR team. His position is as the structural engineer of the team (Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency - Swedish International Fast Response Team, Urban Search And Rescue). In 2015 his USAR team deployed to Nepal directly upon/after the earthquake 7.8. In Nepal he performed rapid visual assessments of earthquake affected buildings such as hospitals.
10:30-11:00	Break
11:00-11:20	“RECONASS Monitoring System & the Damage Assessment Platform” Evangelos Sdongos, RECONASS Project Manager, Institute of Communication & Computer Systems (ICCS)
11:20-11:40	“HOT - Crowdsourced area based damage assessments and comparative damage rankings” Melanie Eckle, Research Assistant HeiGIT - Disaster Mapping and Management, GIScience Research Group, Department of Geography, Heidelberg University Ms. Melanie Eckle is a research assistant at the disaster mapping and management department at the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) at Heidelberg University. She moreover is an active member of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) which she also supports as part of the Board of Directors. Therefore her main work and research focus is on the use of crowdsourcing and user-generated geodata for disaster management and humanitarian purposes. In the scope of the workshop she will be introducing one of her current projects with HOT, the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative (SURI), the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), the University of Colorado and Heidelberg University on crowdsourced area based damage assessment.
11:40-12:00	“The INACHUS System for Buildings Assessment and SAR Operations” Dr. Angelos Amditis, Research Director – ICCS, INACHUS and RECONASS Project Coordinator, Workshop Chair
12:00-12:20	“3D laser imaging techniques to improve USaR operations for wide-area surveillance and monitoring of collapsed buildings” Nicolas Riviere, ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab, F31055 Toulouse, France 3D laser imaging systems operate at night in all ambient illuminations and weather conditions. These techniques can perform the strategic surveillance of the environment for various worldwide operations (up to long ranges). ONERA, the French aerospace lab, develops and models new active imaging concepts based on new sensor technologies. The knowledge of the relevant physical phenomena impacting on the performances of such 3D-lidar techniques is essential to face the new scientific challenges. This presentation will be illustrated by applications such as the ones of the European project INACHUS. INACHUS will improve the detection and localization of trapped victims. It aims to achieve a significant time reduction related to Urban Search and Rescue (USaR) phase by providing wide-area situation awareness solutions.
12:30-14:00	Lunch
14:00-14:20	“A Common Operational Picture for wide-area situational awareness and emergency response planning” Anita Schilling, 3D-R&D Software Engineer, DIGINEXT This presentation will demonstrate how a Common Operational Picture can aid wide-area situational awareness by presenting on-going developments on situation and environment monitoring from the ZONeSEC European project and emergency response management from the INACHUS European project.
14:20-15:20	Panel Session – RECONASS Evaluation Civil Protection community needs for resilient buildings (part A) Moderators: Michael Markus (THW), Evangelos Sdongos (ICCS)
15:20-16:00	Break
16:00-17:00	Panel Session – RECONASS Evaluation Civil Protection community needs for resilient buildings (part B) Moderators: Michael Markus (THW), Evangelos Sdongos (ICCS)
17:00-17:15	Meeting Closure - Conclusions

Workshop Comittee

The workshop committee will be structured as follows:

Organising chairs

Angelos Amditis, Institute of Communication & Computer Systems (ICCS) & National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), A.Amditis@iccs.gr

Evangelos Sdongos, Institute of Communication & Computer Systems (ICCS) and National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), esdongos@iccs.gr

George Athanasiou, Institute of Communication & Computer Systems (ICCS) and National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), george.athanasiou@iccs.gr

Publicity chair

Stephanos Camarinopoulos, RISA Sicherheitsanalysen GmbH, s.camarinopoulos@risa.de

Technical Program Committee

• Konstantinos Loupos, Institute of Communication & Computer Systems, Greece
• Lazaros Karagiannidis, Institute of Communication & Computer Systems, Greece
• Athanasia Tsertou, Institute of Communication & Computer Systems, Greece
• Frank Ellinger, Technical University of Dresden, Germany
• Niko Joram, Technical University of Dresden, Germany
• Rickard Forsen, Swedish Defense Research Agency, Sweden
• Dimitis Bairaktaris, DBA, Greece
• Reza Ghadim, GeoSIG, Switzerland
• Norman Kerle, University of Twente, Department of Earth Systems Analysis, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, The Netherlands
• Francesco Nex, University of Twente, Department of Earth Systems Analysis, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, The Netherlands
• Corrado Sanna, TECNIC Consulting Engineers, Italy
• Vassilis Kallidromitis, TECNIC Consulting Engineers, Italy
• Hassan Shirvani, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
• Annika Nitschke, Federal Agency for Technical Relief, Germany
• Klaus-Dieter Büttgen, Federal Agency for Technical Relief, Germany
• Mata Frondistou, RISA Sicherheitsanalysen GmbH, Germany
• Arjen Boin, Crisisplan, The Netherlands
• Nicola Riviere, ONERA, France
• Frédérique Giroud, CEREN/ENTENTE, France
• Giancarlo Marafioti, SINTEF, Norway
• Gustav Tolt, Swedish Defense Research Agency, Sweden
• Werner Riedel, Fraunhofer EMI, Germany

Workshop Chair and Co-Chair