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A Beginner’s Guide to Fragility, Vulnerability, and Risk

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Encyclopedia of Earthquake Engineering

Introduction

This entry provides a primer for earthquake-related fragility, vulnerability, and risk. Many of its concepts can be applied to other perils. Section “Fragility” discusses fragility – the probability of an undesirable outcome as a function of excitation. Vulnerability (the measure of loss as a function of excitation) is discussed in section “Vulnerability.” Section “Hazard” presents enough information about seismic hazard for the reader to understand risk, which is discussed in section “Risk for a Single Asset.” Section “Conclusions” provides brief conclusions. For solved exercises, see Porter (2014).

Fragility

Uncertain Values

Many of the terms used here involve uncertain quantities, often called random variables. “Uncertain” is used here because it applies to quantities that change unpredictably (e.g., whether a tossed coin will land heads or tails side up on the next toss) and to quantities that do not vary but that are not known with certainty. For example, a particular...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder and SPA Risk LLC, Denver, CO, 80309-0428, USA

    Keith Porter

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  1. Keith Porter
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Correspondence to Keith Porter .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Risk & Uncertainty, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Michael Beer

  2. Institute for Risk and Uncertainty, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Ioannis A. Kougioumtzoglou

  3. Institute for Risk & Uncertainty, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Edoardo Patelli

  4. Institute for Risk & Uncertainty, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Ivan Siu-Kui Au

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Porter, K. (2021). A Beginner’s Guide to Fragility, Vulnerability, and Risk. In: Beer, M., Kougioumtzoglou, I., Patelli, E., Au, IK. (eds) Encyclopedia of Earthquake Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36197-5_256-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36197-5_256-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36197-5

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