The impact of a PEER funded research project, "Inclusion of Modeling Uncertainty, Parameter Uncertainty and Parameter Estimation Uncertainty in PBSD of Ordinary Standard RC Bridges" is highlighted below. The project Principal Investigator (PI) is Joel P. Conte, Professor of Structural Engineering, UC San Diego. The research team includes Angshuman Deb, Graduate Student Researcher, UC San Diego and Jose I. Restrepo, Professor of Structural Engineering, UC San Diego.
Download the Research Project Highlight which includes the abstract. (PDF)
Research Impact:
The targeted additional sources of uncertainty considered are commonly omitted or neglected in PBEE by invoking that the earthquake ground motion uncertainty is the predominant source of uncertainty. However, recent studies have shown that these sources of uncertainty can or are likely to be significant and must be included for a comprehensive seismic performance assessment of structures. Modeling uncertainty is expected to have highly significant effects on PBSD in light of the results of recent blind studies. To our knowledge, a comprehensive PBSD analytical and computational framework accounting explicitly for all pertinent sources of uncertainty is not currently available for bridge structures. Only components and portions of such an integrated framework that includes the targeted three sources of uncertainty in addition to the uncertainties in the seismic input and limit-state capacities (i.e., fragility functions) are available for building structures. Although some analytical treatment of the aleatory uncertainty of FE model parameters already exists as part of the PEER PBEE methodology, the proposed research will focus on the investigation and quantification of the effects of this source and other two sources of uncertainty on the PBSD of OSBs. The proposed research will contribute to the extension and further development of the PEER PBEE framework and resulting PBSD methodology for OSBs by providing a more comprehensive account and treatment of the pertinent sources of uncertainty contributing to the quantification of structural seismic performance.
