Increasingly, economic justification is required for decision making on natural hazards mitigation projects. Therefore, natural hazards loss estimation software, such as HAZUS and CATS in the USA, LessLoss in the EU, and EXTREMUM in Russia, are in various stages of development. A common property of these programs is their closed nature, the source code is not open. Open Source is a new trend in software development, and open source organizations are at the center of a broad thriving movement providing open tools for software development and applications. In the earthquake research arena, OpenSHA (Open Seismic Hazard Analysis,) and the Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (OpenSees) are projects which provide the hazard, and structural modeling modules for loss estimation, respectively. Currently there is a lack of an Open Source Risk Engine. The Open Source Risk Engine (OSRE) aims to fill this void.

The Open Source Risk Engine (OSRE) was developed initially in Kyoto University, Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Urban Management, for the "Capstone Project". The purpose of creating OSRE was to develop a multi-hazards open-source software that can estimate the risk (damage) of a particular site (object) given a hazard and the vulnerability with their associate probability distributions. The original project team was made up of four Kyoto University graduate students (Christakis Mina, Masaki Higuchi, Koichiro Danno, Puay How Tion) and was guided by Professors Scawthorn, Kiyono and Ono. The first version of OSRE (OSRE1) was developed in Visual Basic .net 2003. Several modules of the program were initially coded in FORTRAN, C and Basic and then converted into Visual Basic .net. The next version, OSRE2, extended OSRE1 to include the estimation of the risk of a particular facility class for a particular place for different spectral response. OSRE2 also introduced improvement in accuracy, speed, and the Graphical User Interface. In addition the catalogs of vulnerability data for different facility classes as well as the hazard data for different places in Japan were added to the tool. The Hazard data for different places in Japan were obtained from NIED while the catalogue vulnerability data for different facility classes was obtained from ATC-13. The most recent version, OSRE3, was built upon the two previous versions and it includes several enhancements. The most notable enhancement is the full rewrite of the source in Java allowing the software to become a cross-platform application. It should be noted that all versions of OSRE are in their beta (testing) versions and crashes and bugs are possible. Use the software at your own risk!

You can download OSRE at the Files section of AGORA or from the project's home page at SourceForge.

If you have any queries related to the OSRE project please email Christakis Mina (project leader).