Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Safety and reliability of structures and infrastructure are important to each individual and society. The reliability must be estimated based on probabilistic framework by considering the uncertainty in the occurrence of large earthquake and strong wind events, the service load, and the material and geometric variables. Although many studies are available in the literature for estimating structural reliability, attention towards some of the important aspects that are to be investigated in this proposal is non-existent.The proposed research program will: (i) develop methodology to estimate the reliability of buildings under multi-directional correlated earthquake excitations by considering material and geometric nonlinearity and torsional effects; (ii) develop hazard and risk contour maps caused by hurricane and high intensity wind events (i.e., tornados and downbursts), which can be directly used by emergency preparedness agency and wind energy industry; (iii) provide framework to assess the risk of group of buildings in an urban area under spatio-temporal correlated wind hazard and earthquake hazard, and develop a decision support system for reducing expected losses and managing infrastructure systems. The implementation will be based on geographic information system and its application will be illustrated through prototypes for two selected urban areas. The novelties of the proposal include the quantitative risk assessment of groups of structures or spatially distributed infrastructure systems under spatio-temporally varying wind and seismic excitations, and incorporation of advanced decision theory under uncertainty. Its use can help to prepare for, and to mitigate and recover from catastrophic natural loss; its results can also be used to develop criteria for risk-based objective-oriented codified design. The funding requested for the research program is to be use to support 12 projects and train 12 graduate students who will contribute to the society's effort in reducing the loss resulting from natural disaster, and building and maintaining a resilient society.