SimCenter Forum

Hi Jiajun,

Thank you for your interest in Pelicun; I am happy to hear that you find it helpful for your work!

Pooya: thank you for suggesting those resources for Jiajun; I agree that they are good starting points and help understand the framework.

However, the API changed with pelicun3 and most of the inputs have been streamlined. As soon as pelicun3 gets out of beta, the documentation (https://nheri-simcenter.github.io/pelicun/) will describe the behavior of the new version and provide an API to every method in it. Until then, your best resource is the forum and the Jupyter notebooks I prepare for the live expert tips.

As for your specific question on adding uncertainty to the calibrated demand distribution. Calibration of demands, unfortunately, did not fit in that FEMA P58 example. Pelicun3 does provide a function to calibrate a multivariate distribution to raw demand data. The result of such calibration is the demand parameter description that we prepare in the FEMA P58 example. We only provide the marginal distributions and assume uncorrelated marginals in the example for the sake of brevity, but you can provide a correlation matrix as well if you have such data available.

Would you like to first calibrate a distribution to raw data, or you already have the distribution parameters available and all you need to do is add the modeling and ground motion uncertainties? Both are possible in pelicun, but I'd recommend different procedures depending on what your objectives are. Let me know what you're looking for and I'll explain which methods to use to get the job done.

Adam

Hi Aram,

Thank you for posting on the forum.

When exporting the component database, make sure you select a location where PBE has permission to write the files to. Your Users folder or OneDrive might not work well.
To make our lives easier, I've exported the database and included a zip file here with all of the components in it. Please feel free to use this (i.e., extract the zip file in a folder and point to that folder as the "Damage and Loss Data Folder" in the Components tab in PBE.

Now, about the components that you're missing: the ones with IDs will be in this database, but I am not sure what to do about the first four that have no IDs.
Does this list of components come from the Normative Quantities tool?

Adam

Hi Morty,

Thanks for sharing your input file. This is a strange error. I could run the analysis with your input without seeing any errors.

The stories are indeed well defined and - as you pointed out in our email conversation - the locations defined for the components could also be a problem, but I manually checked all of your locations and I do not see any error.

I have a few ideas on how to find the source of this problem. First, please look at the working directory (you can see where it is by going to Preferences in PBE and looking for the Local Jobs Directory. In there, you should see a pelicun_log.txt. That should provide us more information about what was happening during the assessment when it run into the error.

Please post that pelicun_log.txt and I'll take a look.

Thanks
Adam

That's great to hear; thanks for letting me know!

Adam

Hi Andrés,

Thanks for reaching out; I appreciate your feedback and questions on the new version of Pelicun!

1) This might be a bug, let me double-check and get back to you shortly. Until then, make sure you run the tutorial notebook with version 3.1b4 - there were a few other bugs caught earlier that I've fixed already in that latest beta release.

2) Pelicun does not support skew-normal yet, but it shouldn't be too hard to add it to the script. You'd need to add a few lines of code to the uq.py and model.py modules. Let me know if you're interested and I am happy to provide more information.

Adam

Hi Pooya,

The replacement time calculation in the example notebook is just one way to approximate. It is based on the assumption that one floor is built at a time. Now that I think about it, this is almost surely unconservative.

Your suggestion of using all floors with the maximum number of workers is the other end of the spectrum: this assumes that all floors are being worked on for the entire time of the construction. Note that this leads to four times the replacement time in worker-days for the example building.

A third option that might be more reasonable is to use the replacement cost as the basis of the calculation. Assuming that the building is constructed in Los Angeles, we can use FEMA P58's estimate of daily labor cost per worker: $680 (in 2011 USD). We also need to estimate the proportion of the replacement cost that corresponds to labor; 50% is a conservative estimate in my opinion. Now we can take the full replacement cost ($21.6 million), calculate the amount for labor ($10.8 million) and divide by the cost of one worker-day to get the number of worker-days: 15,882.

Depending on how much information you have about the context the building is built in, you might develop more sophisticated methods for replacement time calculation. Note also that both the replacement cost and replacement time of a building has substantial uncertainty in it. This should be considered in the analysis and it finally can be considered in pelicun 3 if the replacement consequences are defined as uncertain quantities.

I will extend the example notebook with this information. Let me know if you have further questions.

Hi Pooya,

Long Lead Time is described in Section 3.9.2 in Volume 1 of FEMA P58:

Repair time can be significantly affected by long lead times for procurement of critical equipment and components (e.g., HVAC equipment and elevators). Because lead times vary, and are case-specific, they are not explicitly calculated as part of the methodology. If a damage state requires replacement of a component that is associated with a long lead time, this is indicated in the fragility specification and is flagged as part of the assessment results.

Now, in practice, this data is not (yet) used. It is provided to be utilized in the future by more advanced methods for repair time calculation.

I hope this helps.

Adam