Game engine-empowered digital twin for seismic damage simulation of buildings

Destructive earthquakes can cause structural and non-structural damage to buildings , disrupting critical facilities like hospitals and commercial centers and hindering emergency response and recovery efforts. While numerous methods exist for seismic damage assessment, there remains a lack of an integrated method for the comprehensive evaluation of both structural and non-structural elements. To address this gap, this paper proposes a game engine-empowered digital twin (DT) framework for the seismic damage simulation of buildings. Initially, an Unreal Engine-empowered DT framework is proposed by integrating internet of things (IoT), building information modeling (BIM), and physical models, enabling long-term online monitoring and seismic damage simulation of buildings. Subsequently, a method for integrating user-defined simulation models into the DT framework is proposed. Additionally, the Chaos engine is employed for simulating indoor movable facilities, accompanied by a novel indoor disorder assessment method. The simulation of the indoor movable facilities has been validated against the results of E-defense shaking table test , demonstrating the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. The performance of the proposed DT framework is further demonstrated through a case study of a 17-story building, showing that the platform can simulate the building’s nonlinear seismic response and quantitatively assess the degree of disorder of indoor movable facilities under different earthquake excitations. In conclusion, the proposed DT framework provide a universal approach for integrating external physical models and algorithms through modularization. The developed seismic damage simulation DT platform is expected to offer valuable insights for seismic simulation and risk management of civil structures. • A game engine-empowered digital twin framework for the seismic damage assessment of buildings is proposed. • A method for integrating IoT, BIM and user-defined structural simulation models into the digital twin framework is proposed. • A method for simulating seismic response of indoor movable facilities is proposed based on the Chaos physics engine. • An assessment method for evaluating the degree of disorder of indoor movable facilities is proposed. • A DT platform is developed for seismic damage assessment of structural elements and indoor movable facilities.