PEER has published Report No. 2025/08, Efficient Risk Calculation and Epistemic Uncertainty Propagation for Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering Distributed Systems. It was authored by Maxime Lacour and Norman A. Abrahamson, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of California, Berkeley.
The project team includes researchers from LBNL, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, University of Nevada Reno, the NHERI SimCenter at UC Berkeley, and Slate Geotechnical Consultants and its subcontractors Lettis Consultants International (LCI) and Thomas O’Rourke.
Access the report and 2 page summary. Access the full listing of PEER reports.
Abstract
Focused research to advance the seismic risk assessment tool was conducted by Task Groups, each addressing a particular area of study and expertise and collaborating with the other Task Groups. The Task Groups are as follows:
Task A: Fault Displacement
Task B: Liquefaction-induced deformation and seismically induced slope displacement
Task C: Performance of natural gas storage well casings and caprock
Task D: Performance of gas storage and pipeline system surface infrastructure
Task E: Smart gas infrastructure sensing of wells and pipeline connections performance
Task F: Synthesis of component fragilities into a system performance model
This report is the product of the Task Group, as denoted in bolded text above. This report explains in detail the motivation, mathematical formulation, and numerical implementation of the development of a computationally very efficient tool for large-scale risk calculations of distributed systems, including the efficient propagation of the epistemic uncertainty in the fragility models.