Performance-Based Probabilistic Assessment of Liquefaction Induced Building Settlement in Earthquake Engineering

Abstract

AbstractThe Current engineering procedures for estimating liquefaction-induced building settlements (LIBS) utilize deterministic or pseudoprobabilistic approaches that separate the estimation of ground motion intensity measures (IMs) hazard from the estimation of LIBS hazard. In contrast, in a performance-based probabilistic approach, the estimation of the IM hazard is coupled with the estimation of the LIBS hazard. As a result, engineers can directly obtain LIBS estimates corresponding to a selected design hazard level (or return period), which is more consistent with performance-based engineering design. In this study, we make new developments for the performance-based probabilistic assessment of LIBS hazard, including 1) the performance-based assessment of LIBS considering the hazard from a single IM in terms of scalar probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA), 2) the performance-based assessment of LIBS considering the hazard from multiple IMs in terms of vector PSHA, 3) deaggregation of earthquake scenarios from LIBS hazard curves, and 4) treatment of aleatory variability and epistemic uncertainties. We implement the developments in a computational platform named “LIBS” to facilitate their use in engineering practice. Finally, we share the insights from the comparison between the performance-based and pseudoprobabilistic-based estimates of LIBS hazard.KeywordsLiquefaction-induced building settlementProbabilistic assessmentPerformance-based earthquake engineering