PEER Lifelines Program

The goal of the PEER Lifelines program is to improve seismic safety and reliability of lifeline systems. The projects in this program are mostly user-driven research projects, with strong collaboration among sponsoring lifelines organizations and PEER researchers. The PEER Lifelines program has successfully brought together multidisciplinary teams of practicing engineers (geotechnical, structural); scientists (geologists, seismologists, social scientists); funding agencies (Federal, State of California, private industry); academicians, and end-users. An example of such successful multidisciplinary collaboration is the PEER Next Generation Attenuation Models (NGA). NGA has resulted in major advances in characterization of seismic hazard, especially in the western United States.

The PEER Lifelines program is managed by a Joint Management Committee (JMC). The JMC members include representatives of PEER, California Department of Transportation, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, and other major lifelines organizations. Two members of JMC (Jack Moehle and Yousef Bozorgnia) are also members of the PEER Research Committee, ensuring coordination and harmony with the other PEER thrust areas and research projects.

Another unique characteristic of the PEER Lifelines program is its diverse, and mostly non-NSF, sources of funding. PEER Lifelines research projects are mainly funded by the following agencies:

Since 1996, more than 110 projects have been initiated in the PEER Lifelines program. The research projects range from engineering characterization of ground motions, to local soil response, to response of bridge structures, to performance of electric substation equipment. The lifelines research projects are organized into eight topics as shown in the following chart.

If you are interested in knowing more about a specific research project in the PEER Lifelines program, please contact us at: yousef@berkeley.edu. The following web pages provide links to various project final reports, databases and models developed in the PEER Lifelines program:

The PEER Strong Motion database was enhanced in 2005-2007 with the addition of strong motion and site data from Italy. The data is from shallow crustal earthquakes, principally on normal faults, a condition that had previously been sparsely represented in the PEER database. The size of the Italian recording database has increased by an order of magnitude and the data are all uniformly processed by Pacific Engineering and Analysis. A site database for Italian recording stations has also been generated, and includes SASW measurements from Dr. Robert Kayen of USGS from 2006. The PI for this work is Jonathan Stewart of UCLA, with assistance from Giuseppe Scasserra and Professor Giuseppe Lanzo from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. The data is available at http://peer.berkeley.edu/lifelines/research_projects/3A02/.