Sharif Digital Repository

A web-based system is designed and implemented at cira.civil.sharif.edu as a risk communication tool to incentivize the society to take seismic risk mitigation measures. Risk denotes the expected monetary and social losses herein. The objective of this system is to raise the awareness of two groups of audience, i.e., the general public and policymakers,about the significant seismic risk in Iran. To address the general public, the system employs the notion of risk perception to put the results of sophisticated earthquake engineering risk analyses into perspective. The system also treats the epistemic uncertainty in the user input due to general public’s lack of technical knowledge through the... 

This study proposes a probabilistic framework to quantitatively evaluate the resilience of a community comprising a building stock, commercial facilities, and interdependent infrastructure systems. To this end, the proposed framework employs Monte Carlo sampling in which each sample comprises multiple stages. The sample starts with the occurrence of a hazard event. It then follows by evaluating the consequences incurred by the community in the face of the hazard event. It is concluded by simulating the operations aimed at complete recovery of the community comprising inspection, rescue and relief, restoration, and recovery. For this purpose, chains of interacting probabilistic models are... 

In this study, community resilience after a disaster is optimally enhanced for interdependent infrastructures through prioritization of recovery operations considering limited resources. Optimal enhancement of community resilience can be performed at two levels: Pre-disaster and Post-disaster. In the pre-disaster level, resilience enhancement is achieved through optimization of long-term decision making that includes optimized allocation of resources to retrofit of buildings. However, in the post-disaster response and recovery period, allocating resources to retrofit or backup systems is infeasible. Therefore, in the post-disaster level considered in this study, resilience enhancement is... 

Most of the seismic regulations in the Iranian design codes are adopted from the U.S. codes, while the severe earthquake rates with regards to the gross area and total population of Iran is 8.4 and 5.5 times the rates for U.S. respectively. In fact, Iranian rates are between the ones for U.S. and Japan which have up to 200% difference in prescribed strength level in their seismic codes. Poor construction quality regarding defected control in Iran adds to the problem. Therefore, the prescribed strength level of U.S. building codes and thus their target reliability index seems insufficient for use in Iran. Also, previous research has shown that the load and resistance factors in Iranian... 

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... 

This study aims to design and develop procedures, forms, and tools for post-earthquake reconnaissance. The current procedure for data collection is based on the sending of groups to identify the dimensions of the evidence and its consequences by the executive and responsible institutions. Studying and reviewing the reports that have been produced by this method shows that there is not any systematic mechanism for collecting data on a wide scale and from all aspects of the evidence. The limited data collected by the executive and responsible institutions are scattered in the reports and are less documented in the database. Therefore, it is necessary to collect big data on the severity and... 

A probabilistic approach to modeling the seismic damage incurred by structural and nonstructural components is developed in this study. For this purpose, Bayesian linear regression is employed to characterize the epistemic uncertainty in the model. In this approach, regressors are constructed based on the mechanics of damage. In turn, the probability distributions of the model parameters and the model error are quantified by Bayesian regression using real-life data from laboratory experiments and/or post-earthquake inspections of damaged components. The study presents the stepwise procedure of collecting the observations, quantifying the repair costs, developing model forms, performing model... 

This research proposes a probabilistic framework for decision support in emergency response. Currently, decision-making is traditionally based on data from reconnaissance teams, while there are other information sources that assist decision-making. These sources of information include social sensors, physical sensors, aerial imaging, and crowdsourcing. The information obtained from these sources is heterogeneous and uncertain, requires a probabilistic data fusion framework to be used in decision making. This research employs Bayesian Networks for this purpose. The outstanding feature of the Bayesian Network is its real-time nature, which set apart it from other methods. This feature makes... 

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... 

A probabilistic method is presented for identifying the dynamic soil-foundation stiffnesses of building structures. It is based on model updating of a Timoshenko beam resting on sway and rocking springs, which respectively represent the superstructure and the soil-foundation system. Unlike those previously employed for this particular problem, the proposed method is a Bayesian one, which accounts for the prevailing uncertainties due to modeling and measurement errors. As such, it yields the probability distribution of the system parameters as opposed to average/deterministic values. In this approach, the joint probability density function of the parameters that control the flexible-base... 

This thesis presents a new approach to probabilistic seismic hazard analysis. Hazard in this context means the probability of exceeding a measure of earthquake intensity. The main components of the proposed approach are twofold: 1) Reliability methods compute the exceedance probabilities; 2) Multiple probabilistic models compute the earthquake intensity. These two components are presented in details. The proposed methodology is employed in a comprehensive seismic hazard analysis of Iran with an area of nearly 1.65 million square kilometers and 112 sources of seismicity. In this analysis, a grid of 2045 points is chosen to produce a high resolution hazard map. The analysis is carried out for... 

The objective of this thesis is to evaluate and calibrate design load combinations of steel building structures of Iran based on the reliability theory. The importance of this research stems from recognition that the design load combinations for steel structures in Section 6 of the National Building Code of Iran have been completely adopted from the ASCE/SEI 7-10 standard, whereas the factors that affect these load combinations differ in Iran from those of the United States. Examples are the difference in the construction industry economy, lower quality of here and the differences in probability distributions for the specifications of steel. Hence, the load combinations need to be calibrated... 

This thesis proposes a probabilistic modeling framework for networked infrastructure systems in community resilience analysis. In particular, the framework is presented for the electric power infrastructure. Models are proposed at two levels of refinement. The basic model only determines the connectivity of different elements in the network, whereas the refined model also quantifies the amount of the power transmitted through the network elements. In a community resilience analysis, the proposed basic model provides a rather simple tool to determine those buildings and infrastructure systems that suffer from power outage when the supplying power station loses connectivity with the network.... 

This project aims at the calculation of response distribution of a structure using Endurance Time Analysis (ETA). The traditional approach for this calculation is Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA). One of the drawbacks of the IDA is its excessive computational complexity. In the ETA, the structure is analyzed using a set of artificial ground motions with increasing intensities as time passes. As a result, the ETA can be used to calculate the response distribution of the structure in a range of intensities. In the traditional ETA, only the median of the response is calculated. In this study, the response distribution is calculated as well as the median. To achieve this, the proposed approach... 

This paper proposes a novel probabilistic framework for output-only identification of a soil-structure system. The system is modeled by a vertical shear beam resting on the soil representative springs. The proposed framework estimates the unknown parameters of the system and the foundation input motion time history simultaneously, using sparsely measured responses of the structure. The unknown parameters of the system include stiffness of the sway and rocking springs, shear modulus of the beam, and the modal damping ratios of the system. These parameters are modeled as random variables whose joint probability distribution is updated in a Bayesian scheme using the observations of structural... 

This dissertation presents a comprehensive probabilistic framework based on system identification for rapid seismic damage assessment of buildings at regional scale. Given the large number of buildings within a region and the need for rapid damage detection, this research uses simplified models with low computational cost to model each building. For this purpose, stochastic filters are employed as system identification tools. In the first step, a continuous linear model consisting of a Timoshenko beam in combination with the extended Kalman filter is utilized. This model is subjected to joint state-parameter identification under both fixed- and flexible-base conditions. Additionally, the... 

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 extends a probabilistic framework for evaluating the seismic resilience of communities by modeling the transportation system. The framework that is being extended is under continuous development at the Center for Infrastructure Sustainability and Resilience Research (INSURER) at Sharif University of Technology quantifies community resilience by integrating hazard models, risk models, and recovery models within an agent-based simulation. In this framework, the transportation system is modeled by developing a library of probabilistic models to predict the occurrence and intensity of earthquake hazard, damage and capacity of network components, network travel demand, and economic,... 

The main purpose in this study is the determination of offshore structures reliability index over time by considering the simultaneous effects of natural hazards. Importance of this study stems from the effect of events associated with time which induces high amount of uncertainties on offshore structures performance during their life time. Extreme wave, marine current, earthquake, fatigue, corrosion and marine growth hazards are considered in this paper. The intensity and occurrence time of all hazards are time dependent parameter. In addition some of these hazards have the possibility to coincidence and the interaction effect. Whereas, the previous studies in this field, the effect of each... 

This research proposes a Bayesian model selection framework using the stochastic filtering for rapid Bayesian identification of structures under seismic excitations. Structural identification after an earthquake at a regional scale entails a high computational effort. For rapid damage detection on a regional scale, using simplified and low-cost structural models is preferred over complex finite element models, due to the large amount of information needed for finite element modeling of numerous structures within a region as well as the high computational cost of such models. Timoshenko beams, shear beams, and shear buildings are examples of simplified structural models used in this study to...