Evolutionary methodologies for aseismic decision support

One of the primary objectives of the overall earthquake engineering research program is to contribute toward the development of disaster-resilient communities. As a result, there is a general need to model, understand and ultimately direct the behavior of a wide variety of complex multi-scale systems. For example, within the context of a critical care facility, these not only include the structural and non-structural systems that shape the physical environment, but also the organizational systems that define the social and economic climate. Clearly, the problem does not end at the scale of a single hospital. By expanding our view, we can recognize that local communities and large corporations need to make decisions affecting the performance of a system of critical care facilities. At the regional level, one can argue that public policy and resource allocation should be based upon the behavior of systems of systems. Additionally, at each level, there is uncertainty, ambiguity and risk, along with a temporal dimension that must be considered. Evolutionary methodologies may be ideally suited to study and to provide guidance for many of these tasks. Here we concentrate on two aspects of the overall problem, namely, aseismic design and retrofit decision support and organizational decision support. In addition, we attempt to create a theoretical and computational framework that may have applicability for complex decision-making in general.