Prof. Henry Burton's Invited Lecture at RESSLab EPFL
© 2017 EPFL
Prof. Henry Burton from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) is visiting EPFL. As part of his visit will be giving an invited lecture with a title" MULTISCALE MODELS FOR PLANNING AND DECISION-SUPPORT IN THE POST-EARTHQUAKE ENVIRONMENT".
Henry Burton, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UCLA
Date: Friday July 14, 2017
Time: 17h30, Room No. GC C2 413
ABSTRACT
Advancements in the performance-based earthquake engineering framework provide rigorous probabilistic descriptions of seismic performance, using metrics such as economic losses, fatality estimates and downtime. More recently, the concept of seismic resilience has been emphasized, focusing on the role that buildings play in ensuring that communities, particularly urban centers, can minimize the effect of, adapt to and recover from earthquakes. A key aspect of assessing resilience is establishing a link between building performance and the post-event functionality and recovery of a community. Limit states such as functional loss, damage that renders a building unsafe to occupy or irreparable, which (by comparison) have received much less attention in past research, play a central role in evaluating resilience. The ability to quantify factors that affect downtime, business interruption, and restoration of functionality is also relevant. This presentation will explore challenges to utilizing performance-based engineering as a tool to address specific aspects of resilience. Three distinct but interrelated research threads will be described around the central theme of developing models to support building- and jurisdictional-scale planning and decision-making in the postearthquake environment. First a conceptual framework for operationalizing post-earthquake housing recovery within a simulation environment will be presented. The methodology integrates probabilistic assessment of building performance limit states (e.g. functional loss, unsafe to occupy, irreparable damage) with the spatiotemporal representation of homeowner repair and reoccupation decisions and broader factors such as demographics and infrastructure services, to quantify jurisdictional-scale housing recovery trends. Related to the probabilistic assessment of post-earthquake building safety, a framework for calibrating the component-level damage state ratios that trigger building closure based on the increase in collapse vulnerability of mainshock-damaged buildings will also be presented. Finally, a Markovian approach to assessing building structural collapse risk considering both mainshock and aftershock hazard will be introduced.