Seismic Risk Management : a System-based View

Seismic risk management is concerned with complexity of diverse impacts and sorts of uncertainties involved in modeling, assessing and managing the earthquake risk. The way to handle uncertainty is a critical challenge in risk management and can mislead the overall decisions particularly in seismic risk mitigation programs where several projects are involved. Emergent complexity and uncertainties necessitate establishing a risk management system to address the risk in a reliable and realistic way. Current research proposes a heuristic model that combines both theoretically well-grounded system approach and risk analysis on a common framework. Hierarchical system approach is proposed to reduce the complexity of the risk inventory and turn it to set of manageable sub-systems. To capture uncertainties associated with observation and expert judgments, fuzzy modeling techniques was used. The applicability of the proposed models was tested over a group of retrofitting schools. Unlike conventional risk assessment methods, the methodology demonstrated more transparency and flexibility in practice.