Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering

Performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) in United States has had humble beginnings but has made huge strides over the past couple of decades. A majority of tall buildings in western United States are currently being designed using PBEE principles rather than prescriptive code procedures. Successful further development of PBEE requires close collaboration between researchers and practicing engineers. Currently PBEE is undergoing a very important transition from its first generation of methodologies to a new and fully probabilistic approach. For such a transition to be successful a number of research needs and practical requirements must be addressed in a timely and cooperative manner. These needs vary from meaningful definition of desired performance objectives, consequences of not meeting these objectives, dependable characterization of system and component level fragility specifications, meaningful representation of earthquake ground motions, improved understanding of the performance of structure and its contents, soil-foundation-structure interaction, and bridging the gap between and advancing both experimental research and our analytical capabilities. This presentation will briefly discuss these issues and provide examples of problems and solutions that the speaker has encountered in dealing with these needs. The provisions of the newly released LATBSDC Guidelines (scheduled for release on May 15, 2020) will be also discussed.

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11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. PT