An Automated Decision-making System Framework for Earthquake Early Warning System Applications

Earthquakes are one of the most unpredictable natural hazards but recently short-lead-time Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWS) have become practical with a system operating in Japan and another planned for operation in California in the next year or two. A few seconds to a minute or so of early warning is achievable. For example, if appropriate, an early warning can be broadcast to enhance the effectiveness of evacuations, water and gas supplies can be temporarily cut off, and other more advanced engineering applications may also be developed. Due to the limited warning time and the uncertainty of the information from an EEWS, applications that require real-time human decision-making are not practical. This motivates recent research to develop a robust automated rapid decision-making procedure for mitigation actions. A rational procedure is to initiate a potential loss-reduction action if, based on the incoming information from an EEWS, the expected loss from taking no action is greater than the expected loss from taking the mitigation action. To estimate the expected loss of a predicted event, it is proposed to use the recently developed PEER performance-based earthquake engineering methodology.