9816193 Chang This project is funded as part of the U.S./Japan Cooperative Research in urban Earthquake Disaster Mitigation activity, a U.S./Japan Common Agenda initiative. The project aims to develop a cross-cutting methodology for seismic risk assessment and management of urban transportation infrastructure systems through U.S./Japan research collaboration. The approach integrates engineering, systems analysis and economics. Three related tasks will be carried out: (1) Development of performance criteria and design of mitigation strategies, (2) modeling transportation and economic system response in earthquake disasters, and (3) economic evaluation of mitigation strategies. In Task 1, the U.S. role will consist of developing performance criteria based on transportation accessibility measures, working with Japanese counterparts on alternative criteria based, for example, on reliability engineering, and designing associated retrofit and repair strategies for evaluation in the transportation-economic model. Research in Task 2 will focus on improving and expanding upon the L.A. Highways model. This effort will emphasize modeling of earthquake damage repair and associated bottlenecks using experience data from Kobe in order to evaluate the benefits of faster network recovery. Modeling expertise will be shared with the Japanese team as they build similar models for Japan. In Task 3, U.S. and Japanese researchers will collaborate on evaluating the benefits and costs of retrofit and repair strategies, and assessing the economic implications of the performance criteria identified in Task 1. This is a joint project carried out by investigators at the University of Washington and the University of Southern California. ***
