Description
A Master of Science thesis in Civil Engineering by Ahmed Mansour Maky entitled, “GIS-BIM Based Regional Seismic Risk Assessment for Dubai, UAE”, submitted in May 2023. Thesis advisor is Dr. Mohammad AlHamaydeh and thesis co-advisor is Dr. Ahmed El-Kady. Soft copy is available (Thesis, Completion Certificate, Approval Signatures, and AUS Archives Consent Form).
Abstract
In the last two decades, the construction sector in UAE has been expanded to include a high range of tall and supertall buildings. Geographically, this region is surrounded by multiple earthquakes, such as the Zagros Fold and Thrust Belt. Additionally, the Makran Subduction Zone shows an activity source indicating a relatively high seismic risk. A similar situation motivated a research trend in China to simulate an earthquake on a city scale. The research objectives cover developing programming architecture to adapt to parallel computing concepts. Moreover, it targets creating simplified models that can indicate behavior key parameters with fewer DOFs. Both directions pushed into estimating the losses of the simulated hazard within moderate computers. However, the computational complexity of nonlinear simulations was not the only obstacle. The uncertainty in/among the problem modules; (ground motions intensity, structure simulations, damage analysis, and losses estimations) represents another significant concern. In 1995, the structural engineering community established performance-based engineering principles as a probabilistic design process instead of the traditional deterministic philosophy. Additionally, the Computational Modeling and Simulation Center (SimCenter) adopted this methodology into a software platform divided into microprograms. This architecture was designed to be generic to fit different problems according to the type of hazard, simulation, or data availability variation. In 2010, the Regional Resilience Determination (R2D) was released to provide a software package automating this methodology using a graphical user interface. A research plan is proposed to produce a step forward for realistic seismic simulation that includes the conclusion of previous studies and custom development for the UAE location. The objective is to produce an example of an end-to-end framework for seismic risk assessments that integrate with digital transformation trends such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) and the Geographic Information System (GIS). The scope of this investigation is a virtual dataset for RC tall buildings on a dense grid map that considers the variation in building location, material properties, building height, and seismic activity source.