Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) feasibility for school buildings in Patras, Greece, and demonstration of a risk-informed EEW decision support system

Earthquake early warning (EEW) is a real-time seismic monitoring tool which provides methodologies to rapidly appraises earthquakes aimimg to issue real-time warnings just after the occurrence of an earthquake and before the damaging seismic waves reach the target sites. This tesis examines the application of an EEW system together with an engineering application of a decision support system (DSS) in an archetype school building located in Patras, Greece. Different nonlinear analyses are conducted to define the damage states of the archetype building. Calculation of the lead times are executed to different schools in Patras and feasibility index is implemented to understand which schools are prone to be better implementers of an on-site EEW. Loss assessment of the archetype building is performed, which results in terms of repair cost, casualties and repair time were converted to an input of the DSS which was implemented to specifically investigate the optimal decisions (i.e., “trigger”/”do not trigger” alerts). The DSS is based on a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology to consider end-user preferences toward different types of risks. It is discovered that the particular best action to implement for a given ground-shakin intensity can rest on stakeholder (end-user) preferences-