Executive Summary
Welcome to the Risk Management Center's LifeSim Technical Reference Manual. The main purpose of the LifeSim software is to help study teams better understand the consequences of a flood event.
LifeSim is a spatially-distributed, dynamic simulation modeling system for estimating potential life loss and economic damages from flood hazards. A hazard is a natural or man-made event that threatens to overwhelm and injure life and/or property, e.g., a flood, toxic plume, or wildfire. LifeSim explicitly models the warning and mobilization of people potentially exposed to the hazard and predicts the spatial distribution of fatalities within buildings and on road networks expected to be impacted by the hazard. Although LifeSim was developed for dam and levee safety analyses, the software is not limited to breach flood hazards (RMC, 2021) [?]. The key component of LifeSim's methodology is that the magnitude of life loss depends on whether people evacuate successfully and whether those who fail to evacuate can find adequate shelter (Aboelata, Bowles, and McClelland, 2003) [?].
LifeSim is built around a database. Each component exchanges data with other components throughout the database, which includes various GIS layers and tables. Default relationships and values are provided for many inputs. LifeSim's methodology reflects its early authors' understanding of the factors affecting life loss. Simply put, LifeSim determines people and assets that would be subject to a certain flood, how people evacuate or seek shelter, and estimates damages and fatalities for those people and assets caught by the flood.
This technical reference manual describes the methods, internal algorithms, and computations that LifeSim uses to calculate fatalities and damages resulting from floods or other hazards, and to display the spatial distribution of those consequences. A strong understanding of these internal processes will increase the user's ability to identify model limitations, provide suitable inputs, communicate the importance of results, and help validate decisions that LifeSim supports.