Journal of Natural Disaster Science

Performance-Based Prioritization for Upgrading Seismic Reliability of a Transportation Network

Nobuoto NOJIMA
Department of Civil Engineering, Gifu University

(Received July, 1998 and in revised form 1 February, 1999)

Abstract

Prioritized allocation of limited resources is an essential consideration in the seismic improvement of existing transportation facilities. The concept of performance-based prioritization for upgrading seismic reliability of transportation network is proposed. First, the performance measure is defined as the system flow capacity of a road network exposed to seismic risk. Second, a new variance reduction technique for the Monte Carlo simulation method is presented in order to make an efficient reliability analysis in terms of the system's flow capacity. Performance-based prioritization order is then determined using the ranking of Birnbaum's probabilistic importance measure defined as the partial derivative of system reliability with respect to the component reliability of each link. Examples that show prioritization strategy based on various levels of vulnerability and system requirements are given.

Key words

transportation network, seismic retrofit prioritization, system performance, maximum flow, network reliability