Probabilistic regional seismic risk assessment for rational decision making

Earthquakes in the last 100 years have resulted in trillion U.S. dollars in economic losses worldwide. Even moderate-magnitude events, such as the Mw6.7 1994 Northridge earthquake and the Mw6.9 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, have caused widespread damage, significant economic losses, and tens of thousands of families displaced from their homes. In the last two decades, the performance-based earthquake engineering framework developed by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, also referred to as the PEER PBEE framework, has gained much attention from researchers and practitioners not only in the U.S. but also in most seismic-prone countries. This framework was focused on individual structures under seismic hazards. However, large earthquakes occurring close to large urban regions may strike and affect thousands or even millions of structures simultaneously, leading to large numbers of casualties and significant disruptions to the normal functionality of communities. Hence, the concept of "performance" in PBEE needs to be expanded from an individual to a regional scale, with broader definitions of stakeholders and performance metrics in order to evaluate the seismic risk of groups of structures that are spatially distributed within a region, referred to as regional seismic risk. The main goal of this dissertation is to propose improved regional seismic risk methodologies within a probabilistic framework that explicitly quantifies, incorporates, and propagates uncertainties at the different stages of the analysis, in order to provide improved information for decision makers. The main contributions of this dissertation are: • A mathematical formalization of a regional performance-based earthquake engineering (RPBEE) framework for seismic risk assessment of groups of structures and infrastructure spatially distributed within a region. • An improved model for the spatial correlation of ground motion intensity measures, which is based on 39 well-recorded earthquakes and is the first model that explicitly incorporates the event-to-event variability. • Recommendations of ground motion intensity measures to characterize the seismic hazard for regional seismic risk assessment of wood-frame single-family houses. • An investigation on the relative seismic performance of one- and two-story houses, leading to recommendations for future building classification systems for regional seismic risk assessment, where one- and two-story houses are separated into different classes with different seismic vulnerabilities. • Novel fragility curves for estimating the probability of damage to chimneys and severe damage to structural shear walls in wood-frame single-family houses which are particularly useful for improving current approaches to estimate the number of yellow- and red-tagged wood-frame single-family houses. • A model for explicitly incorporating the correlation between the damage in different structures conditioned on their ground motion intensities for regional seismic risk asessment, along with an investigation on the effect of this correlation on regional seismic risk metrics. • A probabilistic framework for evaluating and comparing alternative public policies for enhancing the seismic performance of structures in terms of regional seismic risk mitigation. • Evaluation of the inherent regional risk of collapse implicit with the probability of collapse of individual buildings that is currently specified as acceptable in U.S. seismic design provisions. • A simplified seismic design approach that explicitly considers the regional seismic risk in the seismic design criteria of structures, referred to as "regional-risk-targeted seismic design.".

Advisor: Miranda Eduardo (Miranda Mijares) 
Deierlein Gregory G. (Gregory Gerard)
Kiremidjian Anne S. (Anne Setian)