SBIR-STTR Award

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is that structural engineers will be enabled to design high-performance buildings that have minimal damage in earthquakes. Using the software tool created in this project would fundamentally change the way in which a structural engineer develops the initial design for a building. By enabling engineers to enhance their understanding of building performance, they will be able to design buildings for higher seismic performance and will thus improve the resilience of buildings in future earthquakes. There is a large potential new market for this software, as it can eventually be used by every one of the approximately 10,000 structural engineers designing buildings in the Western United States, and the tens of thousands of engineers working worldwide in regions with earthquake hazards.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop technology to rapidly estimate the structural behavior during an earthquake and also provide a rapid estimation of the inventory of components in a building. This rapid autopopulation will then enable efficient calculations that predict the damage, the repair costs, and the repair time for a building when it experiences an earthquake. The company's method for rapid estimation of structural responses will utilize principles of engineering mechanics, applied to estimating response of a structure whose properties are not fully specified. The method for rapid estimation of building contents will learn from users' updates to the company's initial predictions. The proposed statistical model will enable the company to study this question, and deploy a model that allows real-time and user-specific refinements in a scalable manner.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is that it will enable a group of customers we call Risk Pricers (specifically, property and casualty insurance underwriters and mortgage bankers in financial firms) to profit from tailoring pricing on their products. They can do this by rapidly predicting financial losses for buildings having specific configurations, using the software developed in this proposal. These customers can then tailor pricing of earthquake insurance and mortgage terms based on refined analyses that we facilitate. Besides offering a clear financial benefit to Risk Pricers, this new analysis approach will also fundamentally change market forces and incentives around building safety. If a building's owner is incentivized to improve its earthquake performance (via lower insurance and mortgage costs), then high-performance buildings become more appealing and this will encourage design of better buildings. As the company's software makes more explicit the links between building properties and financial costs, society will benefit from more efficient resource allocation, ultimately leading to increased societal resilience.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop algorithms and software tools that provide financial guidance to customers interested in repair costs and closures of buildings due to earthquakes. To complete the development of its tool, the company will focus on calibrating statistical models to predict displacements and accelerations in a wide range of building types, when they are subjected to earthquake shaking. The company's method for rapid estimation of structural responses utilizes principles of engineering mechanics, but applied in a domain where academic research does not focus (i.e., estimating response of a structure whose properties are not fully known to the analyst). The key identified need is to calibrate a statistical predictive model for the response of a structure that is effective over all popular construction types of interest to customers in the insurance and mortgage banking markets (i.e., light frame wood, steel, concrete, concrete tilt-up). The company will also develop loss metric and calculation outputs that incorporate insurance contract conditions such as deductibles and limits, in order to link the calculations to customers' workflows.