Practical Method for Damage Evaluation Based on Point Estimate Considering Uncertainty of Structural Properties

This study introduces a practical method for evaluating structural damage based on a large-scale simulation targeting expansive areas, like whole cities. In such a seismic simulation that deals with numerous building structures, it is desirable to estimate the damage based on a stochastic evaluation considering the uncertainty of structural properties. This is because an accurate modeling of numerous building structures, according to each designed value, would require a great deal of time. However, a damage evaluation considering the model uncertainty generally involves numerous calculations and is inadequate for such a large-scale simulation. Therefore, we propose a method using the point estimate technique which can estimate the probability of damage under model uncertainty from a small number of calculations. The applicability and usefulness of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing it to the method based on a Monte Carlo simulation.