System-Level Seismic Risk Assessment of Bridge Transportation Networks Employing Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis

Abstract

Earthquakes can have significant impacts on transportation networks because of the physical damage they can cause to bridges. Hence, it is essential to assess the seismic risk of a bridge transportation network accurately. However, this is a challenging task because it requires estimating the performance of a bridge transportation network at the system level. Moreover, it is necessary to deal with various possible earthquake scenarios and the associated damage states of component bridges considering the uncertainty of earthquake locations and magnitudes. To overcome these challenges, this study proposes a new method of system-level seismic risk assessment for bridge transportation networks employing probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA). The proposed method consists of three steps: (1) seismic fragility estimation of the bridges based on PSHA; (2) system-level performance estimation using a matrix-based framework; and (3) seismic risk assessment based on the total probability theorem. In the proposed method, PSHA enables the seismic fragility estimation of the component bridges considering the uncertainty of earthquake locations and magnitudes, and it is systemically used to carry out a posthazard bridge network flow capacity analysis by employing the matrix-based framework. The proposed method provides statistical moments of the network performance and component importance measures, which can be used by decision makers to reduce the seismic risk of a target area. To test the proposed method, it is applied to a numerical example of an actual transportation network in South Korea. In the seismic risk assessment of the example, PSHA is successfully integrated with the matrix-based framework to perform system reliability analysis in a computationally efficient manner.