The impact of epistemic uncertainty on an earthquake loss model

Models capable of estimating losses in future earthquakes are of fundamental importance for emergency planners, for the insurance and reinsurance industries, and for code drafters. Constructing a loss model for a city, region or country involves compiling databases of earthquake activity, ground conditions, attenuation equations, building stock and infrastructure exposure, and vulnerability characteristics of the exposed inventory, all of which have large associated uncertainties. Many of these uncertainties can be classified as epistemic, implying—at least in theory—that they can be reduced by acquiring additional data or improved understanding of the physical processes. The effort and cost involved in refining the definition of each component of a loss model can be very large, for which reason it is useful to identify the relative impact on the calculated losses due to variations in these components. A mechanically sound displacement‐based approach to loss estimation is applied to a test case of buildings along the northern side of the Sea of Marmara in Turkey. Systematic variations of the parameters defining the demand (ground motion) and the capacity (vulnerability) are used to identify the relative impacts on the resulting losses, from which it is found that the influence of the epistemic uncertainty in the capacity is larger than that of the demand for a single earthquake scenario. Thus, the importance of earthquake loss models which allow the capacity parameters to be customized to the study area under consideration is highlighted. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

挤扩支盘桩极限承载力的预测

用双曲线方法对110根挤扩支盘桩的极限承载力进行预测,并与直杆桩预测结果进行对比。结果表明由于支盘桩受力性状复杂,加载前期和中期预测精度较高,后期较低,误差超过15%;支盘桩的沉降曲线出现台阶时预测值与实测值误差较大;支盘桩极限承载力的预测精度与工程地质条件和桩本身的参数密切相关,桩身参数和地质条件相同条件下各桩预测精度比较接近。总体上直杆桩的预测结果优于支盘桩。