pyncoda allows researchers to allocate probabilistic households in building inventories, bridging the gap between physical damage and community resilience.
Structural analysis allows us to estimate physical damage and loss of function, but modeling community resilience also requires detailed information about the population. A community's recovery trajectory is driven not just by the performance of its built infrastructure, but by the coping capacity, resource access, and decisions of its residents.
The NHERI SimCenter is proud to announce a major update to (v4.2). With this release, researchers can seamlessly generate and assign probabilistic households to their building inventories, creating the essential link between homes and their inhabitants.
Powered by Collaboration
This new capability integrates pyncoda, a tool developed by Nathanael Rosenheim, Research Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, within the NIST-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning. pyncoda has been a core component of the IN-CORE computational environment and a key driver in several community resilience studies for over a decade.
While pyncoda has been available as an open-source tool, integrating it into a workflow often required specialized coding expertise. BRAILS++ now wraps this mature methodology and integrates it into a streamlined inventory generation workflow. This makes the power of high-resolution, census-matched household generation accessible to a broad group of experts.
A Complete Simulation Pipeline
This release enables a truly end-to-end simulation pipeline. Researchers can start by creating a building inventory by combining publicly available footprints and building information, and now populate it with detailed household demographics. This enriched dataset seamlessly feeds into the SimCenter’s R2D Tool, paving the way for the integration of models that consider population characteristics at every step—from estimating immediate consequences and displacement to modeling long-term economic recovery.
Try It Today: Any Location in the US
We have added a comprehensive example to the new BRAILS++ release. Unlike static demos, this script allows users to input a location name (e.g., "Berkeley, CA") and generate a complete, spatially joined building and household inventory for that specific area in minutes. The example includes guidance on the underlying algorithms and data sources, serving as both a tutorial and a production template.
“With this update, we are enabling studies that focus on community resilience,” said Adam Zsarnóczay, SimCenter Associate Director for Research Outreach. “By making it easy to place households into our models, we empower researchers to ask the questions that matter most: Who is most affected, and what will it take for them to recover?”