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abstract: Short-notice disasters such as hurricanes involve uncertainties in many facets, from the time of its occurrence to its impacts’ magnitude. Failure to incorporate these uncertainties can affect the effectiveness of the emergency responses. In the case of a hurricane event, uncertainties and corresponding impacts during a storm event can quickly cascade. Over the past decades, various storm forecast models have been developed to predict the storm uncertainties; however, access to the usage of these models is limited. Hence, as the first part of this research, a data-driven simulation model is developed with aim to generate spatial-temporal storm predicted hazards for each possible hurricane track modeled. The simulation model identifies a means to represent uncertainty in storm’s movement and its associated potential hazards in the form of probabilistic scenarios tree where each branch is associated with scenario-level storm track and weather profile. Storm hazards, such as strong winds, torrential rain, and storm surges, can inflict significant damage on the road network and affect the population’s ability to move during the storm event. A cascading network failure algorithm is introduced in the second part of the research. The algorithm takes the scenario-level storm hazards to predict uncertainties in mobility states over the storm event. In the third part of the research, a methodology is proposed to generate a sequence of actions that simultaneously solve the evacuation flow scheduling and suggested routes which minimize the total flow time, or the makespan, for the evacuation process from origins to destinations in the resulting stochastic time-dependent network. The methodology is implemented for the 2017 Hurricane Irma case study to recommend an evacuation policy for Manatee County, FL. The results are compared with evacuation plans for assumed scenarios; the research suggests that evacuation recommendations that are based on single scenarios reduce the effectiveness of the evacuation procedure. The overall contributions of the research presented here are new methodologies to: (1) predict and visualize the spatial-temporal impacts of an oncoming storm event, (2) predict uncertainties in the impacts to transportation infrastructure and mobility, and (3) determine the quickest evacuation schedule and routes under the uncertainties within the resulting stochastic transportation networks. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Industrial Engineering 2020

Damages during extreme wind events highlight the weaknesses of mechanical fasteners at the roof-to-wall connections in residential timber frame buildings. The allowable capacity of the metal fasteners is based on results of unidirectional component testing that do not simulate realistic tri-axial aerodynamic loading effects. The first objective of this research was to simulate hurricane effects and study hurricane-structure interaction at full-scale, facilitating better understanding of the combined impacts of wind, rain, and debris on inter-component connections at spatial and temporal scales. The second objective was to evaluate the performance of a non-intrusive roof-to-wall connection system using fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) materials and compare its load capacity to the capacity of an existing metal fastener under simulated aerodynamic loads. The Wall of Wind (WoW) testing performed using FRP connections on a one-story gable-roof timber structure instrumented with a variety of sensors, was used to create a database on aerodynamic and aero-hydrodynamic loading on roof-to-wall connections tested under several parameters: angles of attack, wind-turbulence content, internal pressure conditions, with and without effects of rain. Based on the aerodynamic loading results obtained from WoW tests, sets of three force components (tri-axial mean loads) were combined into a series of resultant mean forces, which were used to test the FRP and metal connections in the structures laboratory up to failure. A new component testing system and test protocol were developed for testing fasteners under simulated tri-axial loading as opposed to uni-axial loading. The tri-axial and uni-axial test results were compared for hurricane clips. Also, comparison was made between tri-axial load capacity of FRP and metal connections. The research findings demonstrate that the FRP connection is a viable option for use in timber roof-to-wall connection system. Findings also confirm that current testing methods of mechanical fasteners tend to overestimate the actual load capacities of a connector. Additionally, the research also contributes to the development a new testing protocol for fasteners using tri-axial simultaneous loads based on the aerodynamic database obtained from the WoW testing.