Simulating multi-hazard event sets for life cycle consequence analysis

Abstract. In the context of natural hazard risk quantification and modeling of hazard interactions, some  literature separates “Level I” (or occurrence) interactions from “Level II” (or consequence) interactions. The Level I interactions occur inherently due to the nature of the hazards, independently of the presence of physical assets. In such cases, one hazard event triggers or modifies the occurrence of another (e.g., heavy rain and flooding; liquefaction and landslides triggered by an earthquake), thus creating a dependency between the features characterizing such hazard events. They differ from Level II interactions, which instead occur through impacts/consequences on physical assets/components and systems (e.g., accumulation of physical damage or social impacts due to earthquake sequences, landslides due to the earthquake-induced collapse of a retaining structure). Multi-hazard Life Cycle Consequence (LCCon) analysis aims to quantify the consequences (e.g., repair costs, downtime, casualty rates) throughout a system’s service life and should account for both Level I and II interactions. The available literature generally considers Level I interactions – the focus of this study – mainly defining relevant taxonomies, often qualitatively, without providing a computational framework to simulate a sequence of hazard events incorporating the identified interrelations among them. This paper addresses this gap, proposing modeling approaches associated with different types of Level I interactions. It describes a simulation-based method for generating multi-hazard event sets (i.e., a sequence of hazard events and associated features throughout the system’s life cycle) based on the theory of competing Poisson processes. The proposed approach incorporates the different types of interactions in a sequential Monte Carlo sampling method. The method outputs multi-hazard event sets that can be integrated into LCCon frameworks to quantify interacting hazard consequences. An application incorporating several hazard interactions is presented to illustrate the potential of the proposed method.