The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) will complete ten years of National Science Foundation (NSF) support for operations and research at the end of fiscal year (FY) 2014. To develop the next-generation earthquake engineering research agenda and research infrastructure needs beyond 2014, a National Research Council (NRC) committee, convened by the NRC's Division on Earth and Life Studies, Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, will organize a community workshop on the Grand Challenges for earthquake engineering research. This workshop will bring together experts to address (1) the high-priority Grand Challenges in basic earthquake engineering research that require a network of earthquake engineering experimental facilities and cyberinfrastructure, and (2) the networked earthquake engineering experimental capabilities and cyberinfrastructure tools required to address these Grand Challenges. Workshop attendees will be asked to describe the experimental infrastructure capabilities and cyberinfrastructure tools in terms of requirements, rather than by reference to any existing or anticipated located future facilities, and will consider emerging technical and conceptual advances with the potential to influence future earthquake engineering research directions, such as early warning systems, new materials, sustainability, high performance computing and networking, modeling and simulation, sensor and monitoring technologies, and other factors identified by the workshop steering committee. The workshop will be held in fall 2010 at the National Academies Beckman Center in Irvine, CA. The NRC committee will prepare a workshop report summarizing the Grand Challenges and the requirements for networked facilities and cyberinfrastructure. The workshop report will be completed in early 2011. The ultimate goal of the Grand Challenges in basic earthquake engineering research that will be defined by this workshop is to mitigate the effects of future earthquakes and decrease societal risk. This award is part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP).
The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES), supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is an important component of the National Earthquake Hazards Reductions Program (NEHRP). NEHRP is a coordinated effort across four federal agencies to address earthquake risk in the United States. Since 2004, NEES researchers have produced significant advances in the science and technology for earthquake loss reduction that would not have been possible without the network’s experimental facilities and cyberinfrastructure. By Fiscal Year 2014, NSF will have supported 10 years of NEES operations and research. As part of NSF’s preparation of plans for Fiscal Year 2014 and beyond, NSF sought input from the broad earthquake engineering community on "Grand Challenges in Basic Earthquake Engineering Research," with one consideration being that the program after 2014 need not be focused on—or limited to—existing facilities. At the request of NSF, the National Research Council (NRC) hosted a two-day workshop to give members of the community an opportunity to identify grand challenges and to describe networks of earthquake engineering experimental capabilities and cyberinfrastructure tools that could contribute to addressing these challenges. Grand challenges in earthquake research are the problems, barriers, and bottlenecks in the earthquake engineering field that hinder realization of the NEHRP vision—"A nation that is earthquake resilient in public safety, economic strength, and national security" (NEHRP, 2008). As such, they define frontiers in basic earthquake engineering research that would be needed to provide transformative solutions for achieving an earthquake-resilient society. These Grand Challenges are: 1. Community Resilience Framework: The earthquake engineering community currently lacks an interactive and comprehensive framework for measuring, monitoring, and evaluating community resilience. 2. Decision Making: Current research findings related to community resilience do not adequately influence decisions and actions on the part of key decision makers, such as privatesector facility owners and public-sector institutions. Communities typically build based on traditional standards, and when affected by major earthquakes, they respond and recover based on intuition, improvisation, and adaptive behaviors that are drawn from the individuals available to participate. Consequently, the lessons learned in one community and event rarely translate to the next community affected. 3. Simulation: If information concerning the inventory of infrastructure components and points of connection between different infrastructure types were assembled, simulation technologies could model the time and spatial impacts of a seismic event at all length scales, spanning from the component scale to the regional scale, and from disaster response to community recovery. 4. Mitigation: A large earthquake or tsunami in a highly populated region of the United States would cause massive damage to the built environment and communities in the region, and the resulting social and economic consequences would cascade across the country, particularly if major energy, transportation, or supply hubs are affected. The key characteristics of this Grand Challenge include developing strategies to measure, monitor, and model community vulnerability, motivations, and mitigation strategies, and establishing mitigation solutions for the community’s most vulnerable sectors. 5. Design Tools: Developing and exploiting new emerging materials and innovative structural concepts and integrating them within design tools could dramatically improve the performance of all types of infrastructure and increase earthquake resilience in ways that are also sustainable. There is a wide range of sustainable, highly resilient, new materials that can offer opportunities to significantly change the way infrastructure is designed and constructed. Networks of Facilities The second goal of the workshop was for participants to identify the general requirements for networked earthquake engineering experimental capabilities and cyberinfrastructure tools associated with addressing the grand challenge problems. The suggested experimental facilities cover testing and monitoring over a wide range of scales, loading regimes, boundary conditions, and rates on laboratory and field (in situ) specimens. Cyberinfrastructure tools are also important for capturing, analyzing, and visualizing experiments and for supporting the advanced simulations discussed in the workshop. The 14 facilities that could contribute to solving the grand challenge problems are: 1. Community resilience observator. 2. Instrumented city. 3. Earthquake engineering simulation center. 4. Earthquake engineering data synthesis center. 5. Earth observation. 6. Rapid monitoring facility. 7. Sustainable materials facility. 8. Networked geotechnical centrifuges. 9. SSI shaking table. 10. Large-scale shaking table. 11. Tsunami wave simulator. 12. Advanced structural subsystems characterization facility. 13. Non-structural, multi-axis testing facility. 14. Mobile facility for in situ structural testing. The report is available for free PDF download from: www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13167
