Structural design for earthquake resilience: Info-gap management of uncertainty

Abstract Resilience in recovery of critical functionality, after severe adverse events such as earthquakes, is a key concept in design of structures and infrastructures. We discuss three distinct challenges: the inherent uncertainty of the system, exogenous uncertainty of loads on the system, and vulnerability of the putative system to adverse events. We develop an info-gap robust-satisficing approach for managing these challenges. We illustrate the method with seismic examples comparing relatively flexible base-isolated structures against stiffer seismic resistant structures. These examples illustrate that the preference between these designs, based on their robustness against uncertainty, depends on the performance requirement. The potential for reversal of preference between competing designs is quantified by intersection between the info-gap robustness curves of those designs. We prove a proposition asserting conditions under which the robustness curves for two different designs will cross one another, entailing the potential for reversal of preference between the two designs. The resulting robust-satisficing design decision may differ both from performance-optimization, in which the design that is predicted to have better performance will be chosen, and from the min–max design.