Mechanical and Civil Engineering Seminar

Tall buildings have become a staple of the central business district in cities such as Los Angeles,

San Francisco and San Diego. They facilitate increased residential and commercial development, offering

higher density occupancy compared to their low-rise counterparts on the same area of land. This

presentation will showcase data, tools and methodologies that have been developed to enable the use of

remote sensing to assess and enhance the seismic resilience of tall buildings in dense urban environments.

First data-driven and hybrid (combination of data-driven and mechanistic) methodologies for

reconstructing seismic responses within and across multiple buildings will be presented. Methodologies

that make use of measured seismic responses and/or field observations to support rapid assessment of

earthquake-induced building damage and performance will also be discussed. Additionally, a framework

that integrates the Markov Process with Dynamic Programming to support time-dependent optimal

decision-making for mainshock-damaged tall buildings in the aftershock environment will be presented.

The objective is to minimize the cumulative expected aftershock loss from various sources such as the cost

of repairing structural and nonstructural damage, fatalities due to collapse and functional disruption. The

presentation will also showcase several datasets have been generated, curated and assembled as part of the

overall project, including scenario-based ground motion records and building seismic responses generated

from nonlinear response history analyses and recorded during historical earthquakes.