Seismic fragility assessment of highway bridges using support vector machines

Seismic fragility curves provide a powerful tool to assess the reliability of structures. However, conventional fragility analysis of structures comprising a large number of components requires enormous computational efforts. In this paper, the application of probabilistic support vector machines (PSVM) for the system fragility analysis of existing structures is proposed. It is demonstrated that support vector machine based fragility curves provide accurate predictions compared to rigorous methodologies such as component based fragilities developed by Monte Carlo simulations. The proposed method is applied to an existing bridge structure in order to develop fragility curves for serviceability and collapse limit states. In addition, the efficiency of using the PSVM method in the application of vector-valued ground motion intensity measures (IM) as well as traditional single-valued IM are investigated. The results obtained from an incremental dynamic analysis of the structure are used to train PSVMs. The application of PSVM in binary and multi-class classifications is used for the fragility analysis and reliability assessment of the bridge structure.