## 1 Introduction  
With a population exceeding 14 million and a GDP of more than 300 billion USD, Istanbul is the major driver of the Turkish economy. Unfortunately, this concentration of social and economic assets is constantly threatened by potentially devastating earthquakes, as the city is close to several well-known fault systems. Turkey is, in fact, located in one of the most active earthquake regions in the world. There is clear evidence for several significant earthquakes (magnitude greater than 7) happening in the last 2000 years in the eastern Marmara region [1], and in the recent past we have already witnessed large-scale disasters. In particular, on 17 August and 12 November 1999, two earthquakes occurred in the western extension of the North Anatolian fault, causing more than 15,000 casualties in the towns of Izmit and G d c ik, with more than 300,000 housing units destroyed or damaged and more than 600,000 people displaced [2]. The impact of this earthquake was also significant in economic terms, with a cost of between 5 and 14 billion USD [3]. There is general agreement among the researchers that a large seismic event could strike this area in the near future [1, 4, 5, 6]. A magnitude 7.5 strike-slip earthquake occurring on the Marmara fault, considered a worst-case scenario compatible with the local seismic hazard [4, 6, 7], could cause up to 30,000 to 40,000 fatalities and possibly result in more than 30% of the overall building stock being moderately or extensively damaged [7, 8]. Among the prevention and mitigation measures adopted by the Turkish government in the aftermath of the 1999 disasters is the establishment of the Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool (TCIP), a public sector insurance entity whose mission is to provide catastrophe risk insurance to homeowners at national level [9]. The main objectives of TCIP are:  
* the provision of affordable earthquake insurance coverage for all urban dwellings,
* the limitation of the government's financial exposure to natural disasters,
* the improvement of risk reduction and mitigation practices in residential construction. Since its foundation in the year 2000, TCIP has achieved a 39.5% penetration rate in Turkey, with more than 6.9 million policies, and a 51.1% penetration rate in Istanbul with 1.9 million active policies (Source: TCIP). With a short-term forecast of reaching 10 million policies by 2020, equivalent to a national market share of about 55%, TCIP has already produced a massive increase in the risk awareness of the population, and has inspired several other earthquake-prone countries to launch similar programs [9]. Despite these encouraging figures, the occurrence of a powerful earthquake in a high-density metropolitan area would seriously challenge the operational capabilities of TCIP to efficiently settle the related claims. Since 2010, TCIP has successfully managed more than 10,000 claims, with a single event (the 2011 Van earthquake) totaling alone 8700 claims. However, a M7+ event in the Istanbularea, as mentioned above, could generate an astounding 300,000 claims in a few weeks [8,10], an overwhelming number that would require years to be settled. When analyzing the internal claim management process, a potential bottleneck was found in the inspection procedure, which requires an experienced operator to physically visit the building hosting the related policy to assess the actual level of damage. While this procedure is suitable to a routine claim management, it would be unfeasible for a massive event, requiring thousands of operators working concurrently in the field. The necessity of a more efficient methodology for policy-related data collection in order to streamline the claim management process is evident from the above considerations, and requires innovative approaches in order for this issue to be tackled properly.