3392003 - Impact of Uncertainties in Seismic Performance Assessment of Highway Systems

Project Title/ID Number	Impact of Uncertainties in Seismic Performance Assessment of Highway Systems—3392003
Start/End Dates	10/1/03—9/30/04
Project Leader	Anne Kiremidjian (Stanford/F)
Team Members	Ozgur Yazlali (Stanford/GS), Renee Lee (Stanford/GS)

F=faculty; GS=graduate student; US=undergraduate student; PD=post-doc; I=industrial collaborator; O=other

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1. Project Goals/Objectives:

The objective of this project is to investigate the influence of uncertainty on risk assessment of spatially distributed systems, such as transportation network. More specifically, the goals are to:

Study the sources and influence of uncertainties in bridge fragility functions on spatially distributed systems; these will include uncertainties in engineering demand parameters as well as in capacity parameters
Propagation of uncertainties through the loss estimation process

Through this process, possible improvements to the PEER performance based equation will be investigated that will enable to better incorporate uncertainties that have the greatest influence on risk computations.

2. Role of this project in supporting PEER’s mission (vision):

This project will attempt to identify the sources of uncertainty that have the largest influence in bridge fragilities. Quantification of uncertainties is key to the overall performance paradigm.

3. Methodology Employed:

The project has only just begun. We are currently exploring various methods that include simulation and sensitivity analysis.

4. Brief Description of past year’s accomplishments (Year 6) & more detail on expected Year 7 accomplishments:

This project started in February of 2004.

5. Other Similar Work Being Conducted Within and Outside PEER and How This Project Differs:

There are several researchers within PEER that are developing methods for fragility analysis of bridges. We will collaborate with them to identify the specific sources of uncertainty that they have incorporated in their work.

6. Plans for Year 8 if project is expected to be continued:

7. Describe any actual instances where you are aware your results have been used in industry:

Too early to tell.

8. Expected Milestones & Deliverables:

This proposal covers the milestones and deliverables for Year 7 only:

Identify sources of uncertainty in fragility functions. Possible fragility functions to consider include: HAZUS, DerKiureghian, Shinozuka, and others developed in Europe or the MAE Center. If fragility functions become available from other researchers within PEER (e.g. Kunath, Stojadinovic and Conte), then these will be considered as well. The influence of these uncertainties on individual bridge damage and loss assessment will be investigated and quantified in terms of second order statistics.
Assess the influence of various uncertainties on risk estimation of a spatially distributed system. To conduct these investigations a test bed network will be selected in coordination with CALTRANS.