Sharif Digital Repository

The objective of this thesis is to prioritize a portfolio of buildings for seismic retrofit. A new set of sensitivity measures is proposed to rank the buildings in accordance with the reduction in the loss of the entire portfolio. To this end, various risk measures are differentiated with respect to the cost of retrofit for each building. These risk measures are the moments of the portfolio cost probability distribution which imply the risk-neutral and risk-averse decision making. Two costs are considered: Construction cost due to retrofit and repair cost due to structural and non-structural damage. To quantify the risk, reliability methods are employed in which many interacting... 

This thesis extends a probabilistic framework for evaluating the seismic resilience of communities by probabilistic modeling of the telecommunication infrastructure failure and recovery along with its interdependencies with other infrastructures. This framework, Rtx, that is being extended under continuous development at Sharif University of Technology, is based on modeling the community state from hazard incident until complete recovery by a combination of risk and agent-based simulation models. In this thesis the framework is extended with telecommunication infrastructure models. This infrastructure is modeled by developing a library of probabilistic models to predict damage to network... 

This study proposes a probabilistic approach to prioritize a collection of buildings in a region for seismic retrofit based on regional risk analysis. Risk in this context is the exceedance probability of total economic and social losses, which include both direct and indirect consequences resulting from building damage. The prioritization criterion is determined by the benefit-to-cost ratio of retrofit, where the benefit is measured by the reduction of seismic risk achieved through retrofitting. Hence, the buildings are analyzed both in their current state and after retrofit to compute the risk measure, i.e., the mean total loss. Buildings that yield the highest reduction of the risk... 

Nowadays one of the important issues in earthquake engineering is seismic vulnerability assessment of structures and selecting the best retrofit method for them. On the other hand due to probabilistic nature of earthquake occurrence and uncertainties exist in determination of structure capacity, probabilistic approaches in seismic assessment and retrofit of structure, are highly interested by many researchers. Therefore in this research four probabilistic based methods in seismic retrofit and assessment of structures are proposed and to illustrate the application of these methods, which are summarized below, some RC frames are investigated:
1- Seismic assessment of structures using new... 

This research develops a probabilistic framework for evaluating community resilience subject to earthquake events by modeling the water distribution system and its prevailing inter- and intra-dependencies with other infrastructure systems of the community. This framework is entitled “Rtx,” which is under continuous development at the Center for Infrastructure Sustainability and Resilience Research (INSURER) at Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. It quantifies the community resilience by integrating hazard models, risk models, and recovery models within an agent-based simulation. Comprehensive modeling of the water distribution system requires a library of probabilistic models,... 

This thesis presents the seismic hazard and seismic risk analysis of the City of Golpayegan using reliability methods and multiple interacting probabilistic models. These models evaluate the seismic hazard intensity by simulating the hazard event and evaluate the seismic risk by simulating the building portfolio and infrastructure systems under the hazard event and quantifying the ensuing consequences. In this context, hazard is the exceedance probability of a ground shaking intensity measure, and risk is the exceedance probability of social and economic losses. This is the first time in the literature that reliability methods are applied in evaluating the seismic risk of a real-world city... 

Rapid visual screening is a way to assess unsafe structures and reduce urban earthquake vulnerability. Although this method is faster than detailed analytical methods(e.g. Incremental dynamic analysis), it still requires a lot of time and financial resources to execute. Due to the widespread use of computer vision in engineering, this study has used this technology to perform rapid visual screening, improve its overall process and provide a standard method for automatic assessment of structures. In the process of rapid visual screening, the screener identifies features from the exterior view of the building, which are finally recorded in a scoring system. According to the score obtained,... 

This thesis aims to assess the seismic risk of the community of schools with masonry buildings in the Tehran metropolitan in the next 50 years and to prioritize the buildings of this community for seismic retrofit based on the optimal mitigation of risk of the community. Tehran is among the largest cities with the highest level of seismic risk in the world, and Masonry buildings are among the structures with poor seismic performance; Therefore, it is essential to conduct a comprehensive and accurate evaluation of the seismic risk of schools, as one of the most critical and sensitive occupancies, in this region and with this type of structure. It is also very beneficial to reduce the seismic... 

This research proposes a probabilistic framework for seismic risk analysis of industrial plants of oil infrastructure using reliability methods. The proposed approach integrates multiple probabilistic models and system reliability to quantify the seismic risk of the process plants. A chain of probabilistic seismic hazard and risk models is utilized for the risk analysis. The Monte Carlo sampling method is used to propagate the significant uncertainty in the hazard event, damage to components and its consequences, and the potential losses incurred by process plant. In each sample of the analysis, hazard models simulate the occurrence, magnitude, and rupture area and location of earthquake... 

This dissertation proposes a probabilistic framework for optimal calibration of design provisions based on the minimization of lifecycle cost (LCC) and its uncertainty. Subsequently, this framework is utilized to determine the optimal robust design base shear coefficient of building structures, and propose a methodology for codifying it while preserving the current structure of the base shear equation. In the first part of the proposed methodology, various structures are designed with different seismic base shears. Then, at each site, their LCC comprising the construction costs and seismic losses is calculated. Various types of seismic loss considered in this study include the direct...