Outofbounds software
- Domain: Disaster protection and response
- Country/City: Athens, Greece
- Website: outofbounds.gr
- E-mail contact: qwazix@outofbounds.gr
Safe(ci)ty – Safety Application For Earthquake CITY protection
Safe(ci)ty is a tool designed to make cities smarter by predicting how buildings will respond both before and after earthquakes. It will collect and present information about the structural state of buildings in the city in order to both be prepared for seismic events and automatically provide a validation of the status of a building after it.
This will be achieved by:
(a) leveraging the internet of things and installing accelerometers on top of buildings in order to measure the drift of the roof during smaller, frequent earthquakes and compare it to the values expected at design time for the given seismic acceleration. This comparison will allow cities to know in advance if specific buildings or whole areas are in danger in the event of a major earthquake or tornado. If the drift is much bigger than the projected one it is an indication of the possible reaction of the structure to seismic forces.
(b) enabling engineers working in construction design and building permission to evaluate rapidly whether the structural design of a building complies with a set of regulatory, empirical and statistical rules and best practices. In this way, the user can easily validate the design against common errors, hidden stress points and other issues that might need special attention. The wide adoption of the Eurocodes makes it easy to kick-start the project in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and later aim for global coverage.
The results of both parts of the system will be visualized on false-colour maps of the city where high risk areas/buildings will be highlighted. Last but not least, it can be used post-disaster to evaluate quickly which buildings are dangerous and should be evacuated.
The Team
The team comprises the following members:
Michael Demetriou, civil and software engineer, responsible for project management and development;
Panagiotis Stamatelopoulos, developer and FIWARE expert, responsible for development;
Sotos Demetriou, civil engineer, providing structural engineering consultation, on demand.