New developments for the performance-based assessment of seismically-induced slope displacements

Abstract

This study presents new developments for the performance-based assessment of seismically-induced slope displacements (D). Performance-based procedures enable a hazard-consistent and rational seismic design of slope systems; hence, their use in practice is appealing. However, they are not the standard in engineering practice because their use is considered too complex to be used for non-critical projects. The developments presented in this study allow the straightforward estimation of displacement hazard curves (DHC) for a wide range of slope systems subjected to earthquakes in different tectonic settings (i.e., shallow crustal, and subduction), considering a rigorous quantification of the existing uncertainties.

The new developments include 1) full integration of probabilistic seismic hazard assessments (PSHA), and the estimation of DHCs, 2) automatic estimation of DHC for D models with multiple intensity measures through vector PSHA, 3) estimation of DHC for systems with contributions from multiple tectonic settings, 4) uncertainty treatment (i.e., epistemic and aleatory) on DHCs, through a logic tree scheme, 5) deaggregation of earthquake scenarios from DHCs, and 6) uncertainty quantification on DHCs through the polynomial chaos theory. The new developments are implemented in a MATLAB graphical user interface (GUI) to facilitate its use by engineers and researchers. We discuss illustrative examples and guidelines for the application of the GUI to evaluate the seismic performance of different slope systems that are affected by earthquakes from multiple tectonic settings.