Special Session on “Loss and Resilience Assessment Tools for Infrastructure Exposed to Natural Hazards” being Organized by the Ergo Consortium at the ICONHIC 2019 Conference

Urban areas and critical infrastructure are exposed to natural and manmade hazards, which are becoming more frequent and have severe consequences on world economies and societies. Therefore, cities and infrastructure resilience to extreme events and diverse hazards such as tsunamis, hurricanes, fires, landslides, floods, climate change, man-made and technological risks, is of paramount importance for maintaining functionality and operability during and after the hazard event. Risk analysis software is a powerful tool that provides well-informed loss estimates aiming to facilitate decision-making and risk management by stakeholders and city planners toward resilient cities, infrastructure and societies.

The present special session is motivated by the need to bring together developers and users of loss and resilience assessment tools for natural hazards aiming to present recent advances, discuss future needs and connect the latest research and engineering practices to practitioners and decision makers. The session invites researchers, software developers, practitioners and stakeholders dealing with software on vulnerability, risk and resilience analysis of cities, buildings and infrastructure against natural and manmade hazards. The following themes are encouraged, but not limited to:

• Loss estimation and modeling platforms for natural or/and manmade hazards
• Multi-hazard assessment, response, and planning tools
• Resilience-based design and assessment tools for buildings and infrastructure
• Fragility assessment tools for buildings and infrastructure
• Decision support tools for risk management and recovery
• Case studies for cities and infrastructure exposed to diverse hazards

For more information regarding the Special Session, please, feel free to contact the session organizers.