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Seismic risk management is concerned with complexity of diverse impacts and sorts of uncertainties involved in modeling, assessing and managing the earthquake risk. The way to handle uncertainty is a critical challenge in risk management and can mislead the overall decisions particularly in seismic risk mitigation programs where several projects are involved. Emergent complexity and uncertainties necessitate establishing a risk management system to address the risk in a reliable and realistic way. Current research proposes a heuristic model that combines both theoretically well-grounded system approach and risk analysis on a common framework. Hierarchical system approach is proposed to reduce the complexity of the risk inventory and turn it to set of manageable sub-systems. To capture uncertainties associated with observation and expert judgments, fuzzy modeling techniques was used. The applicability of the proposed models was tested over a group of retrofitting schools. Unlike conventional risk assessment methods, the methodology demonstrated more transparency and flexibility in practice.

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Kamran Vahdat is PhD candidate specializing in critical infrastructure resilience and using artificial intelligence in multi-hazard riskmodels. He is currently working in the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure at University of Leeds developing different decision support models for infrastructure risk management.

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