A decision-making methodology for risk-informed earthquake early warning

Abstract

To maximize the potential of earthquake early warning (EEW) as a credible tool for seismic resilience promotion, it should be combined with next-generation decision-support tools that use advanced risk-based predictions and account for unavoidable malfunctions of the system (i.e., false alarms) to determine whether or not alerts/mitigation actions should be triggered. This work contributes to the required effort by developing a novel end-user-oriented approach for decision making related to very short-term earthquake risk management. The proposed methodology unifies earthquake-engineering-related performance assessment procedures/metrics (for end-user-focused damage and consequence estimation) with multicriteria decision-making tools (to consider end-user preferences toward different types of risks). It is demonstrated for EEW in a hypothetical school building, to specifically investigate the optimal decisions (i.e., “trigger”/“do not trigger” alerts) for a range of earthquake scenarios with varying parameter uncertainties. In particular, it is found that the best action for a given ground-shaking intensity can depend on stakeholder (end-user) preferences.