Decision Support for Seismic Performance Evaluation

North Carolina State University, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

At all stages in the structural life-cycle, engineers are faced with the formidable challenges of complex decision-making, including open-ended and ill-structured problems, uncertain and perhaps incomplete data, and models with varying scales and levels of refinement that may be incompatible. Overall, goal of this research is to develop formal computational approaches that support comprehensive decision making in structural engineering. Specifically, these approaches will be realized in a prototype decision support system that draws on the complementary strengths of the engineer and the computer in a joint-cognitive system. Its design will be based on three major concepts- (1) optimization for evaluating alternatives and supporting what-if analyses; (2) sub-component approach to address structural model synthesis, scalability, model updating and uncertainty propagation; and (3) implementation in an object-oriented framework of high performance distributed computing. A series of simple and real-life test cases will be used to evaluate the proposed prototype.