Probabilistic Models for Visual Damage

The context of this paper is performance-based earthquake engineering, which is characterized by the consideration of a broad set of consequences of ground shaking. The paper reports ongoing work to assess the direct and indirect cost of building damage. A novel focus on the repair action is put forward. The repair action is selected based on probabilistic prediction of visual damage. In turn, the time and cost of the repair is predicted, again with probabilistic models. The paper describes the overall approach and reviews the model development methodology. In addition to a comprehensive treatment of uncertainty, the development of explicit probabilistic models facilitates reliability analysis to obtain performance probabilities. This approach is contrasted with the utilization of conditional probabilities integrated by the theorem of total probability.