Seamless Simulations of Earthquake Disasters and Economy at

1:1 scale Utilizing Big-data

Amit Gill∗ Maddegedara Lalith Hideyuki O-tani
gill@eri.u-tokyo.ac.jp Tsuyoshi Ichimura RIKEN Center for Computational
Dept. of Civil Engineering Kohei Fujita Science
The University of Tokyo Earthquake Research Institute Kobe, Hyogo, Japan
Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan The University of Tokyo h.o-tani@riken.jp
Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan
lalith,ichimura,fujita@eri.u-
tokyo.ac.jp

Muneo Hori Yoshiki Ogawa Filippo Gatti

Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Center for Spatial information Science Université Paris Saclay
Science and Technology The University of Tokyo CNRS, CentraleSupélec
Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan Meguro, Tokyo, Japan France
horimune@jamstec.go.jp ogawa@csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp filippo.gatti@centralesupelec.fr

ABSTRACT ACM Reference Format:

We present a novel approach for utilizing big data to estimate eco-
nomic impacts of disasters by performing end-to-end simulations
of disasters and economy at 1:1 scale. In order to realize such fine-
grained economic simulations, we developed a high-performance
computing extension for Agent Based Economic Models (ABEMs)
and seamlessly integrated it with a physics-based earthquake dis-
aster simulator. Due to the lack of availability of the data of each
individual economic entity, we generated data for 127 million agents
by disaggregating the macroeconomic data available from several
Japanese government agencies. Using the generated large data set,
the ABEM is validated for the Japanese economy by reproducing
past observations. As a demonstrative application of the developed
system, we estimate the economic impacts of a disaster in Hanshin
industrial region caused by a potential Nankai-trough mega-thrust
earthquake, and the disaster hit economy is compared with normal
state of the economy up to a period of 3 years.
CCS CONCEPTS
· Applied computing → Law, social and behavioral sciences;
· Law, social and behavioral sciences → Economics.
KEYWORDS
agent-based economic simulations, microeconomic data, earth-
quake impacts, post-disaster economy
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WI-IAT ’21 Companion, December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia
© 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9187-0/21/12. . . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3498851.3498937
Amit Gill, Maddegedara Lalith, Tsuyoshi Ichimura, Kohei Fujita, Hideyuki
O-tani, Muneo Hori, Yoshiki Ogawa, and Filippo Gatti. 2021. Seamless
Simulations of Earthquake Disasters and Economy at 1:1 scale Utilizing
Big-data. In IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence
(WI-IAT ’21 Companion), December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia.
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3498851.3498937
1 INTRODUCTION
Big-data analytics has revolutionized decision making in various
fields, ranging from health care, marketing, corporate, governance,
etc., by utilizing the fine scale data. Data backed high-resolution
simulations of complex systems provide powerful insights into their
functioning. One such complex system which can benefit from high-
resolution simulations is the national economy, especially after a
disaster, in order to analyze the economic impacts and conceive
optimal recovery plans.
In recent past, an increase in the frequency of severe disasters has
been observed worldwide. Consequently, the losses due to disasters
have grown manifold. Although significant progress has been made
towards saving human lives from a disaster, a substantial progress
is yet to be made to safeguard the economy. Most of the economic
impacts of a disaster are indirect and they often receive less atten-
tion because of the lack of understanding of the complex interplay
among the individual economic entities, dependence on infrastruc-
tures, etc. Standard post-disaster economic analysis methods are
too coarse-grained to examine these complex interactions. In order
to understand this complex system, we need to simulate it as a
collection of interacting individual economic entities considering
their dependence on each other and infrastructural components.
Realizing the need for a fine-grained simulator of economy and
infrastructure, we developed a High-Performance Computing (HPC)
enhanced Agent-Based Economic Model (ABEM)[2] to simulate na-
tional economies at 1:1 scale and integrated it with relevant physics-
based simulators to include the damage states of infrastructure
components. While the developed HPC-enhanced framework can

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WI-IAT ’21 Companion, December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia
accommodate any common ABEM, we use the ABEM developed
by Poledna et al. [5] as base ABEM. The ABEM consists of almost
all the major economic entities (e.g., millions of firms divided into
several industries, foreign firms, government, central bank, each
individual investor, worker, inactive household, bank, etc.) and all
the model parameters including the initial agent settings can be set
from real-world economic data.
We present verification and validation of the developed system,
as well as a demonstrative application targeting the simulation of
the Japanese economy in the aftermath of a disaster in Hanshin
industrial region, due to a potential Nankai-trough earthquake.
First, we calibrate the system to the Japanese economy. Ideally, the
parameters of the agents must be set according to the data of their
real-world counterpart. Because of the lack of data at this scale, we
generate the model parameters and economic data for the economic
entities from the macro-economic data of Japan. Specifically, we use
Input-Output table (IO-table), System of National Accounts (SNA),
sector-wise employment data, business census data, demographic
data, family income and expenditure survey data, gross domestic
product data, etc., which are available at various official websites
of the Japanese government. Data disaggregation procedures for
the industrial and government agents are presented in detail.
The generated model of the Japanese economy consists of 127
million agents comprising 1.8 million firms divided into 104 sectors,
and 122 million households. Using the generated large data set, we
validate our system for a normal state of the Japanese economy.
In order to simulate an earthquake disaster, the ABEM has been
integrated with Geographic Information System (GIS) to obtain ge-
ometrical information of infrastructure, an Integrated Earthquake
Simulator (IES)[3] for performing strong ground motion and seis-
mic performance evaluation of infrastructure, and performance
assessment calculation tool (PACT)[1] to evaluate repair cost due
to the seismic damages. Some of these tools have been modified
and improved to speed-up the analysis. The seismic performance
of 1.8 million buildings of the Osaka bay area due to a potential
Nankai-trough mega-thrust earthquake - as proposed by the Cabi-
net office of Japan - has been analyzed and the resulting economic
impacts have been estimated. Under a simple recover plan, the
model outputs show that the firms and households need one year
to recover their damaged capital. It is observed that the increased
economic activities will continue in the long-run after the disaster.
The rest of article has been organized as follows. Section 2 pro-
vides an overview of the ABEM and its HPC-implementation. The
model parameter generation process has been explained in section
3. Section 4 presents the model verification and validation. Section
5 demonstrates an application of the integrated system for seam-
less simulations of an earthquake disaster and economy. Section 6
concludes.
2 HPC-ENHANCED AGENT-BASED
ECONOMIC MODEL
2.1 Overview of the ABEM
In a 1:1 scale ABEM, each real-world economic entity is modeled
as an autonomous agent whose actions are defined based on behav-
ioral economics. Figure 1 presents a schematic diagram of a typical
ABEM consisting of various types of agents: firms, investors, active
102
Gill and Lalith, et al.
Figure 1: Schematic diagram of a typical ABEM
and inactive households, banks, central government, and central
bank. These heterogeneous agents interact mimicking various real-
world economic activities such as buying and selling (i.e., goods
market). Every interaction between two agents results in relevant
decision-making and economic transactions. The firms buy capital
goods and intermediate input goods from firms of other industries.
The workers supply labor to firms and receive wages in return.
Using the purchased goods and hired labor, a firm produces capital
goods and/or consumption goods. Foreign sellers import goods from
other economies, while the foreign buyers export products to other
economies. Investors represent firm owners and receive dividends
as their income. The inactive households represent non-working
population who receive social benefits from the government. Firms
and households keep their deposits with the banks and request
for loans when required. The government buys various goods and
services, provides social benefits, and collects taxes to cover its ex-
penses. The government takes loan from the central bank to cover
any financial gaps. Central bank controls the monetary policy and
determines the policy rate. The markets evolve over time depending
on the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the participating agents.
2.2 Scalable HPC-implementation
While the execution of 1:1 scale models of large economies, consist-
ing of hundreds of millions of agents, is computationally demanding,
the dozens of variables associated to each agent demands a large
memory. As an example, the input data for the Japanese economy
with 127 million agents is about 18 GB, classifying it a big data
problem.
In order to address the high computational and memory demand,
we implemented a distributed memory parallel HPC-enhanced
code [2] using C++ and MPI (Message Passing Interface). The ma-
jor challenge in developing a scalable HPC-enhanced code is the
complicated interactions of the agents on centralized graphs like
the credit network, and scale free randomly growing graphs like
labor market and goods market. By partitioning the agents based
on a representative graph of the labor market and adopting various
strategies to minimize the number of MPI communications, we im-
plemented a scalable HPC-enhanced code. Further, we eliminated
performance bottlenecks caused by memory intensive operations,
which access large volume of data, by implementing cache friendly
data structures and algorithms. Our scalability test simulations with
Seamless Simulations of Earthquake Disasters and Economy at 1:1 scale Utilizing Big-data
331 million agents produced 70% strong scalability on 128 CPUs of
Oakbridge-CX1 . Further, the execution of a single period required
only 110 seconds. These results show that our code is not only
scalable, but also requires relatively low computational resources,
making it possible to conduct Monte-Carlo simulations of large
economies using 1:1 scale models; Monte-Carlo simulations are
required to address the uncertainties involved.
3 DATA GENERATION FOR SIMULATING
JAPANESE ECONOMY
In our HPC-enhanced code, we adopted the ABEM developed by
Poledna et al. [5] as the base ABEM. This base ABEM is applicable to
economies of all sizes ranging from prefecture economy to national
economy to large economic zones. However, the potential of the
model cannot be realized to make reasonably accurate forecasts for
a given economy unless the model parameters and agents’ data are
derived from the real data. The model requires two types of data:
parameters which are shared by all the agents of a particular class,
and agent specific data which is unique for each agent. This section
briefly describes how to identify the necessary model parameters by
analyzing various sources like government statistics, central bank
reports, etc. Since the main objective of this research is to simulate
the Japanese economy in the aftermath of earthquake disasters,
this section mainly focuses on identifying model parameters for
the Japanese economy. However, most of data extraction methods
discussed here may be applicable to other economies with a little
or no modifications depending on the nature of the available data.
3.1 Required Parameters
Before diving into the data generation process, it is important to
identify the required parameters. A detailed list of required input
parameters is available in [5]. Because of the limited space, the list
is not reproduced here.
3.2 Data Sources
The implemented base ABEM [5] is a micro-founded model. There-
fore, ideally, the parameters of each agent should be set according
to the balance sheet of its real-world counterpart. However, data at
such a fine scale is hardly available or too expensive to buy even if
available. Although all the public companies publish their balance
sheets quarterly, from which their financial data can be obtained,
no information is available regarding their production decisions.
Some companies, like Teikoku Data Bank and Bureau van Dijk,
provide the complete data of individual firm including production
quantities and supply-chain networks. Such data can be valuable
in mimicking each company’s production and price decision. How-
ever, often, such data is too expensive for academic researchers
to afford. The same problem exists with the households’ data and
banks’ data.
In the absence of the data of individual economic entity, the
macroeconomic data published by the Japanese government was
found to be a reliable source from which a consistent set of the
required parameters could be generated. The following Japanese
1 https://www.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/supercomputer/obcx/service/
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WI-IAT ’21 Companion, December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia
organizations (governmental and policy think-tanks) are the main
data sources for this study.
• the Cabinet Office
ś https://www.cao.go.jp/index-e.html
• portal site of official statistics of Japan (e-Stat)
ś https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en
• the Bank of Japan.
ś https://www.boj.or.jp/en/index.htm/
All these data sources2 were extensively searched to obtain a
consistent set of data from which all the required input parame-
ters for the model can be extracted. With careful analysis of the
data from the above sources, we could find quite consistent sets of
data, from which the required input parameters could be estimated.
Out of the above, the main source of data is e-Stat. The following
sections describe the input parameters identification process for
industries, individual firms, individual households, banks, central
government, and the central bank.
3.3 Industrial Parameters
The required parameters for industries consists of two main sets:
sector parameters which are common for all the firms of an industry,
and the parameters of each individual firm. Sector parameters define
the inter-dependencies between the industries in terms of input
goods and capital goods consumed. In addition, the consumption
behavior of households, government, exporters, and importers is
also captured by sector parameters. The Input-Output table from
e-Stat is the main data source for the sector parameters.
3.3.1 Sector Parameters. For deriving sector parameters, 2015 Input-
Output Table (IO-table) [4] at producers’ price for Japan3 is used.
The IO-table for Japan is complied every 5 years. Usually, there
are two main compilations: IO-table at producer’s price and IO-
table at purchaser’s price. The main difference between the two
is the accounting of commercial margins and domestic freights.
For the IO-table at purchasers’ price, a transaction recorded in a
sector includes the price of goods or services and the associated
commercial margins and domestic freights, while for the IO-table
at producers’ price, commercial margins and domestic freights are
recorded in the commerce sector and transport sector respectively;
only the value of goods or services is recorded in their respective
sectors. Since the amount of commercial margins and domestic
freights varies for different goods and in many cases, even for same
goods and services depending on transaction patterns, input co-
efficients obtained from the IO-table at purchasers’ price are not
stable. On the contrary, input coefficients obtained from IO-table at
producers’ price are stable. Therefore, IO-table at producers’ price
is often recommended for the analysis of IO-table. Hence, IO-table
at producers’ price is used in this study. Table 1 shows a represen-
tative IO-table at producers’ price for Japan. The model parameters
generated from the IO-table are also shown in the table.
2 The web addresses given in the list were accessed on 15t h September, 2021.
3 https://https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en/stat-search/filespage=1&layout=datalist&
toukei=00200603&tstat=000001130583&cycle=0&year=20150&month=0&stat_infid=
000031839447&tclass1val=0, accessed on 31t h May 2021
WI-IAT ’21 Companion, December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia Gill and Lalith, et al.

Table 1: Overview of IO-table at producers’ price

(Less) Imports

Domestic Production
Supply sector (seller) Intermediate demand Final demand

Consumption expenditure

Consumption expenditure

Consumption expenditure
of general government

of general government

fixed capital formation

fixed capital formation

Private consumption

(Social Fixed capital)

outside households

Increase in stocks
Gross domestic

Gross domestic

(private sector)
(public sector)
expenditure
.

Sector-n
Sector-1

Sector-2

Exports
.

Total

Total
.

Demand sector (buyer)

Sector-1 𝑚 11 𝑚 21 ··· 𝑚𝑛1 𝐴1 ℎ 11 ℎ 12 𝑔1 𝑐 11 𝑐 12 𝑐 13 𝑠1 𝑒1 𝑑1 𝑖1 𝑦1

Intermediate

··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ··· ···
Input

Sector-n 𝑚 1𝑛 𝑚 2𝑛 ··· 𝑚𝑛𝑛 𝐴𝑛 1

ℎ𝑛 2
ℎ𝑛 𝑔𝑛 1
𝑐𝑛 2
𝑐𝑛 3
𝑐𝑛 𝑠𝑛 𝑒𝑛 𝑑𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑦𝑛

Total 𝑀1 𝑀2 ··· 𝑀𝑛 𝐴 𝐻1 𝐻2 𝐺 𝐶1 𝐶2 𝐶3 𝑆 𝐸 𝐷 𝐼 𝑌
Consumption expenditure
outside households
𝑤11 𝑤21 ··· 𝑤𝑛1 𝑊1

Consumption of employees 𝑤12 𝑤22 ··· 𝑤𝑛2 𝑊2

Gross value added

Operating surplus 𝜋1 𝜋2 ··· 𝜋𝑛 Π

Consumption of fixed capital 𝑘 11 𝑘 21 ··· 𝑘𝑛1 𝐾1

Consumption of fixed capital
(Social fixed capital)
𝑘 12 𝑘 22 ··· 𝑘𝑛2 𝐾2
Indirect taxes (except custom
duties and commodity taxes 𝑡 1𝑌 𝑡 2𝑌 ··· 𝑡𝑛𝑌 𝑇𝑌
on imported goods)
(less) Current subsidies 𝑡 1𝑃 𝑡 2𝑃 ··· 𝑡𝑛𝑃 𝑇𝑃

Total of Gross value added 𝐺𝑉 𝐴1 𝐺𝑉 𝐴2 ··· 𝐺𝑉 𝐴𝑛 𝐺𝑉 𝐴

Total Domestic Production 𝑦1 𝑦2 ··· 𝑦𝑛 Y

In addition to the IO-table, two other data sets: System of Na- much within one year, we assumed the firm size distribution in
tional Accounts (SNA)4 and Sector-wise Employment data5 , are 2015 to be the same as that in 2016. The industrial classification
also used. Total capital, bank deposits, and bank loans of the firms used in the enterprise census data for 2016 is different from that in
of each industry are obtained from SNA. The number of workers the 2015 IO-table. According to the definition of each sector in both
in each industry are obtained from Sector-wise Employment Data the data sets, the firms and workers distribution for the sectors of
which is available at e-Stat. 2015 IO-table [4] at producers’ price 2015 IO-table were derived by merging or splitting relevant sectors
for Japan is our base data, and all other data sets are normalized to of the 2016 enterprise census data. The sectors were split based on
the IO-table data. the ratio of workers in the constituent sectors.
3.3.2 Parameters of Individual Firms. Ideally, the parameters of
firm agents must be set according to the characteristics of the 3.4 Government’s Data
corresponding real world counterpart. Due to the unavailability of The parameters required by the government agent are consumption
each individual firm’s data, we generated firm agents’ parameters budget, various taxes and subsidies rates, subsides and unemploy-
by disaggregating the data obtained from above mentioned sources. ment benefits paid to households, and tax rate set by the central
Since the quantity produced by a firm is directly proportional to the bank. The data generation process can be summarized as follows.
number of workers employed by it, the size distribution of firms (1) The government allocates its budget to spend in various
can be obtained from the workers distribution among firms. e-Stat sectors through its agencies. The number of agencies is not
provides the firm size distribution for Japan for 20166 . explicitly available from the data. Therefore, this number
The latest available IO-table for Japan is for the year 2015. There- is assumed to be 25% of the number of total firms in the
fore, the base year of the data set for the current study is set to 2015. economy.
However, firm size distribution for 2015 is not available, and the (2) The government’s consumption budget is considered to be
closest available is that for 2016. Since the firm sizes do not change an exogenous parameter and set according to the SNA data.
4 https://www.esri.cao.go.jp/en/sna/stock/stock_top.html,
and https://www.esri.cao.go. (3) Indirect-taxes and subsidies for industries are obtained from
jp/en/sna/sddsplus/sddsplus_top.html, accessed on 31s t May 2021 the IO-table. Consumption tax rate and social benefits re-
5 https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en/stat-search/files?page=1&layout=datalist&toukei=
ceived by the households are obtained from the household
00200603&tstat=000001130583&cycle=0&stat_infid=000031839523&tclass1val=0,
accessed on 31s t May 2021 income, expenditure and saving data7 and the IO-table data.
6 https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en/stat-search/files?page=1&layout=datalist&toukei=
00200553&tstat=000001095895&cycle=0&tclass1=000001106256&tclass2=
7 https://www.esri.cao.go.jp/en/sna/household/household_top.html, accessed on 15t h
000001107036&tclass3=000001114545&stat_infid=000031721990&tclass4val=0,
accessed on 31s t May, 2021 September 2021

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Seamless Simulations of Earthquake Disasters and Economy at 1:1 scale Utilizing Big-data WI-IAT ’21 Companion, December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia

The missing rates for taxes like export tax, corporate tax, etc.

Nominal HHs Consumption(in billion Euro)

are assumed to be zero. 38.5
(4) The government debt (LG ) is obtained from the SNA data8 .
The interest rate on loan (r G ) is assumed 0 because of the 38.0

lack of data.
37.5
The required parameters for the remaining agents: households,
foreign firms, and central bank, are also obtained from the afore- 37.0
mentioned sources. The data generation process for these agents is Original ABEM
not presented here due to limited space. 36.5 HPC-enhanced ABEM

4 VALIDATION OF THE AGENT-BASED 0 2 4 6

Period
8 10 12

MODEL
(a) Nominal Consumption by Households
Verification and validation are essential steps in scientific methods 72.0
to ensure that a numerical implementation is devoid of errors, and
the underlying mathematical model is capable of reproducing the

Nominal GVA (in billion Euro)

71.0
phenomena being modeled, respectively.
70.0

4.1 Verification 69.0

For the verification of our HPC-enhanced implementation, we com-
pared the results obtained from our implementation with the results 68.0

provided by Dr. Poledna from his MATLAB implementation of the Original ABEM
67.0 HPC-enhanced ABEM
same ABEM [5]. Followings are the problem settings used for the
verification test. 0 2 4 6 8 10 12
(1) The model parameters and initial data of agents are taken Period

from Poledna et al. [5]. There are 9.92 million agents compris-
ing 0.61 million firms divided into 62 industries, 4.11 million
workers, and 4.13 million inactive households.
(2) Simulation is conducted for 13 periods and each simulation
period represents one financial quarter.
(3) Only one simulation is conducted without randomness in-
troducing variables like the error part in AR(1) process.
Figure 2 presents a comparison of two macroeconomic variables.
As seen, the results from our HPC implementation are in a close
agreement with those from Dr. Poledna’s, verifying that our imple-
mentation is error free.
4.2 Validation
Though Dr. Poledna has already validated his ABEM for Austrian
economy [5], it is essential to re-validate it for the Japanese economy
to ensure that the ABEM with any modification we introduced and
with the input parameters for the Japanese economy we prepared
can reproduce the Japanese economy to a sufficient accuracy. We
validate our HPC-enhanced ABEM for the Japanese economy by
comparing the model outputs with the observed economic data as
described below.
4.2.1 Problem Settings. The problem for the validation is set as
follows.
(1) The model parameters and initial parameters of the agents
are generated according to the process mentioned in the
last section and using Japanese economy data of Q1 2015.
Table 2 shows the number of different types of agents in the
generated model.
8 https://www.esri.cao.go.jp/en/sna/sddsplus/sddsplus_top.html, accessed on 2nd June
2021
(b) Nominal Gross Value Added
Figure 2: Comparison of outputs of the HPC-enhanced
ABEM with that of original ABEM [5]
(2) One simulation period represents one financial quarter.
(3) Simulation is conducted for 22 periods starting from Q1 2015
to Q2 2020, and the results are compared with the observed
data from the SNA data.
(4) Neither external inputs or instructions are given to the model
during the simulations.
(5) AR(1) process is used for making economy-wide forecasts
of growth and inflation rates which are used by the firm
agents and others to make their production and consumption
decisions. In order to estimate the AR(1) models, economy-
wide production and GDP-deflator data from Q1 2011 to Q4
2014, obtained from the SNA, are used.
(6) As mentioned in section 3.3.2, the sizes of all the firms in a
sector are not available in any of our data sources, and we
randomly generated the firms’ sizes. In order to take this
uncertainty of firm size distributions and other uncertanities
such as the decision of agents, Monte Carlo simulations are
conducted with 1000 random samples of firm size distribu-
tions. Further, the error term in the AR(1) processes used
for forecasting growth and inflation rates also introduces
randomness in the simulations making the firms of same
size in different simulations to take different decision.
(7) The simulations are conducted using 64 MPI ranks with 1
OpenMP thread each in the Oakbridge-CX super computer
of the University of Tokyo.

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Table 2: Number of various agents in the ABEM for the 90.0 Observed

Real HHs Consumption(in trillion Yen)

Japanese economy. 87.5 Simulated

85.0
Agent Type Number of Agents 82.5
Industrial Sectors 104 80.0
Domestic Firms 1.84 million
77.5
Foreign Buyers Firms 920,000
75.0
Foreign Sellers Firms 104
Investors 1.84 million 72.5

Workers 60 Million 70.0

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
Inactive Households 62 million Period
Bank 1
(a) Real Consumption by Households
Government Agencies 460,000 170.0
Central Bank 1 Observed
Total 127 million Simulated

Nominal GDP(in trillion Yen)

160.0

150.0
4.2.2 Comparison of Model Outputs and Observed Data. Out of sev-
eral economic indicators available from the model, a comparison of
140.0
two macro-economic indicators is presented: real households’ con-
sumption and nominal GDP (see Figure 3). The dark and light gray
130.0
regions represent ±1σ and ±2σ uncertainty margins, respectively.
As displayed in Figure 3, the simulation results are in a good
120.0
agreement with the observed data, except for the last two periods, 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
Period
correspond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which the model agents
are not aware of it. Observed time series lie within the ±1σ margin, (b) Nominal Gross Domestic Product
validating that the model can reproduce Japanese economy with a
reasonable accuracy. Figure 3: Comparison of model outputs and observed data
for real consumption by households and nominal GDP
5 SIMULATION OF POST-DISASTER
ECONOMY
In this section, we estimate the economic impacts of an earthquake Kobe city
disaster, under a simple hypothetical recovery scenario, as a demon-
strative application of the integrated system. We integrated the
developed HPC-enhanced ABEM with an Integrated Earthquake
Simulator (IES)[3] and Performance Assessment Calculation Tool
(PACT)[1] to perform end-to-end simulations of earthquake disas-
ters and economy.
Osaka city

5.1 Disaster and Impacted Region

nd
sla

According to The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and

jii
wa

Tourism of Japan, there is 70%-80% probability of occurrence of a Repair cost (JPY/m2 )

A

Nankai-trough earthquake of magnitude M8-M9 within 30 years. 10000 40000 60000 80000 100000
For this study, we choose the Nankai-trough earthquake scenario,
as proposed by the Cabinet Office of Japan, since it is anticipated
to impact economically important regions of western Japan. We
assumed that the earthquake will occur in the economically impor-
tant Hanshin industrial region. In order to estimate the economic Figure 4: 1.8 million buildings of the simulated region and
impacts, 1,786,845 buildings of Osaka city, Kobe city, Awaji island, their repair cost per unit floor area estimated by PACT.
and surrounding areas, as shown in Figure 4, are considered in this
study. These include buildings of all major occupancy types like,
commercial offices, schools, hospitals, retail stores, houses, hotels, 5.2 Infrastructure Data from GIS
production facilities, etc. The first step is to obtain the buildings properties viz., number of
The integrated system follows a four-step process to perform floors, floor area and floor height, occupancy type, construction
end-to-end simulations of earthquake disasters and economy. The material, and load-resisting system. First three items are obtained
following four sub-sections briefly describe these steps. from the GIS data. Information about construction material and

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Seamless Simulations of Earthquake Disasters and Economy at 1:1 scale Utilizing Big-data
load-resisting system is not available, so, these values were assumed
depending on the buildings’ dimensions, number of floors and floor
area.
5.3 Seismic Performance Evaluation using IES
In the second step, strong ground motion under each building and
the corresponding seismic response of each building are simulated
using the IES[3]. The IES provides floor wise seismic displacement,
velocity, acceleration, story drift, etc. for all the buildings.
5.4 Loss Estimation using PACT
After obtaining the seismic response of the buildings, their associ-
ated repair costs are estimated using PACT. In addition to the seis-
mic demand parameters, PACT requires quantities of structural and
non-structural components of the buildings. Because of the lack of
data, we use a nominal quantity estimation tool, which comes with
PACT, to estimate normative quantities of various non-structural
components typically present in a building. PACT provides a list
of standard load-resisting systems and their components. Accord-
ing to the definition of various load-resisting systems provided by
PACT, we assigned load-resisting systems to buildings depending
on their construction material and height.
Using dimensions, occupancy type, quantities of structural and
non-structural components, and seismic response data of individual
building, each and every building was analyzed using PACT to
obtain repair cost, repair time, and probability of being assigned an
unsafe placard. The PACT provides repair costs in USD which we
convert to JPY based on the average exchange rate for 2015 since we
assume the disaster to occur in Q1 2015. The cost of constructing
a new building is assumed as 323,000 JPY per unit m2 floor area.
Figure 4 presents the distribution of estimated values of repair cost
per unit floor area. We can see that the repair cost is in the range of
40,000 to 60,000 JPY/m2 with an overall average of 25,510 JPY/m2 .
The average repair cost is less than 10% of the cost of a new building.
5.5 Post-disaster Economic Simulations using
ABEM
In the last step, repair cost estimated by PACT are assigned to the
economic agents occupying the damaged buildings. Because of the
lack of real data, a reasonable estimate of the building occupants is
obtained by making the assumptions given below.
(1) Depending on the occupancy type, the buildings are assumed
to belong to firms of an industry or households.
(2) The repair costs for buildings are assigned as capital losses
to individual firms and households in proportion to the floor
area occupied by them. We assume that the floor area per
employee of "Education", "Medical Service", and "Health and
Hygiene" sectors is 83.6 m2 (900 ft2 ),9 and for all other sectors
is 13.9 m2 (150 ft2 ) 10 . Living space required for a worker or
inactive household is assumed as 22.3 m2 (240 ft2 ), and 33.45
m2 (360 ft2 ) for an investor.11
9 The assumption is based on size of a basic classroom or hospital room
10 The approximate floor area per employee is in the range 9.3-16.7 m2 https://www.
reitasiapac.com/tokyos-office-space-shrunk-to-its-smallest-on-record-in-2019/
11 22.3 m2 is average living space per person in Japan. https://resources.realestate.co.
jp/living/how-much-living-space-does-the-average-household-have-in-japan/
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WI-IAT ’21 Companion, December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia
(3) Based on the values of unit floor area required for a worker,
the number of affected workers and loss per worker are
calculated for each occupancy type. Similarly, total number
of affected households is also determined.
(4) To assign the losses to firms of sector k, n f firms of that
Ín f
sector are randomly selected such that j=0 N j ≥ Naf f (k),
where N j is the number of workers of firm j and Naf f (k) is
total number of workers affected in sector k. N j × Uw is the
loss assigned to a randomly selected firm j, where, Uw is the
unit loss per worker.
To assign the losses to individual investors, ni number of
investors are randomly chosen and assumed to be affected
by disaster, where ni is the number of affected investors as
determined in previous step. Average value of loss is assigned
to each affected investor. Similarly, losses are assigned to
affected workers and inactive households.
To simulate post-disaster economy using the ABEM, in addition
to the settings given in section 4.2.1, the following settings are also
adopted.
(1) The disaster is assumed to occur at the end of first simulation
period i.e., Q1 2015, or in other words, in the beginning of
second simulation period i.e., Q2 2015.
(2) The agents’ behavioral rules are modified to make them re-
cover their damaged capital. All the agents allocate recovery
budget equal to their unrecovered capital. The households
agents receive government aid to recover their damaged
homes whereas firms use their own financing for the recov-
ery.
(3) A worker affected by the disaster is able to work half-time
only. Unaffected workers can work overtime also but with a
maximum limit of 1.5 times their normal time.
Figure 5 compares the mean values of various macro-economic
indicators under disaster scenario and normal scenario. As we can
see in Figure 5a, the firms lose capital of worth 1.29 trillion JPY
in the disaster period. In order to recover their lost capital, all the
affected firms allocate investment budget towards recovery. Fig-
ure 5a also shows that the firms are able to recover their lost capital
by the end of 3r d period. Similarly, the households also allocate
higher investment budget to recover their lost capital as shown in
Figure 5b. However, households can not spend their planned invest-
ment budget completely in the disaster period and a few periods
after the disaster because of the limited supply of investment goods
in the economy. Households need 4 quarters i.e., 1 year, to recover
their damaged capital.
Because of higher demand of investment goods in the economy,
the firms producing investment goods plan to produce more. Since
the firms of different industries are interdependent on each other
for their input goods and capital goods, the demand for all the goods
increases. In order to scale up their production to satisfy higher
demands, the firms buy more input goods as shown in Figure 5c.
Figure 5d shows that total production drops by 0.62 trillion JPY
compared to the normal scenario in the disaster period because of
the shortage of capital (Figure 5a). However, the decrease in total
production is significantly small compared to total production. It
is because of the fact that the firms try to maintain their capital
utilization rate at 0.85. For most of the firms, the capital loss didn’t
WI-IAT ’21 Companion, December 14–17, 2021, ESSENDON, VIC, Australia Gill and Lalith, et al.

1337.0
impact their production since the loss is smaller than the extra
capital stock. In case of higher capital losses, a significant decrease
Firms Real Capital (in trillion Yen)

1336.0
in production is expected and consequently, the economy will take
1335.0
a different recovery path. The firms keep producing at full capacity
1334.0 to satisfy higher demands in the economy surpassing the normal
1333.0
scenario production level in the second period. The figure also
shows increased economic activities in the long run because of
1332.0
Normal Scenario
sustained higher demand and consequently higher employment in
1331.0 Disaster Scenario the economy.
A very simple recovery scenario, assuming that there are un-
1330.0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 limited repair crews, no disruptions to transportation, lifelines,
Period
supply-chain networks, etc., was considered in this numerical ex-
(a) Firms’ Real Capital periment. More complex settings, considering the availability of
16.0 repair crews, availability of transportation networks, repair time,
Nominal HH Capital Budget (in trillion Yen)

Normal Scenario
Disaster Scenario
etc., are necessary for realistic estimations of the economic impacts
14.0
and to evaluate the effectiveness of different recovery plans.
12.0
6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
10.0 We presented a demonstrative simulation of Japanese economy at
1:1 scale in the aftermath of a potential Nankai-trough earthquake
8.0
using an ABEM. The economic data for each of the 127 million
6.0 agents of the Japanese economy were generated by disaggregating
the macroeconomic data of Japan published by various agencies
4.0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 of the Japanese government, and the model was validated by re-
Period producing the observations for the period of 2015 to 2019. Seismic
(b) Households’ Capital Budget damages to the buildings were estimated by analyzing each and
every building under the earthquake scenario. By initializing the
Firms Real Input Goods Bought (in trillion Yen)

124.0
ABEM with the generated economic data and estimated repair costs,
122.0 post-disaster economy was simulated under a simple recovery plan.
The developed system can be utilized to quantitatively evaulate
120.0
the long term economic performance of a given detailed recovery
118.0
plan (i.e., when each building will be repaired and access to life-
lines will be restored, etc.). Further, avaialbility of real data, such as
116.0 historical balance sheets of individual economic entity, structural
Normal Scenario details of each building, information on the post-disaster behavior
114.0 Disaster Scenario of economic entities, etc. will contribute to realize more accurate
evaluation of post-disaster economy.
112.0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
Period
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
(c) Real Input Goods Bought by Firms
This work was supported by JSPS Kakenhi grant 18H01675. Parts
275.0
of the results were obtained using the Oakbridge-CX supercom-
puter at the Univ. of Tokyo., and the supercomputer Fugaku at the
Real Production (in trillion Yen)

270.0
RIKEN Center for Computational Science through the HPCI System
265.0 Research Projects (Project IDs: hp200256 and JPMXP1020200203).
260.0
REFERENCES
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255.0
lation Tool (PACT). https://femap58.atcouncil.org/pact.
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250.0 Disaster Scenario Tsuyoshi Ichimura. 2021. High-Performance Computing Implementations of
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0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
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[4] Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan. 2021. 2015 Input-Output
Figure 5: Comparison of mean values of various economic Tables for Japan. https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000732915.pdf.
[5] Sebastian Poledna, Michael Gregor Miess, and Cars H Hommes. 2020. Economic
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