Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Recent advances in performance-based earthquake engineering and existing information technologies provide opportunities to develop extremely granular inventories of the built environment and assess its vulnerabilities to earthquakes as well as other hazards. This presentation focuses on bridges—which are arguably the most critical elements of a transportation network—and delineates the ingredients needed to bring a regional seismic assessment tool to fruition. These ingredients range from site-specific ground motion estimation to automated development of analysis models for bridges using data harvested from publicly available repositories, to damage and economic loss assessment. After identifying the ingredients, an overall framework is articulated for regional risk assessment of transportation networks. Several application examples are provided to demonstrate the viability of the envisioned approach, and its natural extensions to other areas including structural performance monitoring and rapid post-event assessment.