Perspectives on the use of Active Structural Control Systems for Seismic Early Warning

In thinking about feasibility of earthquake early warning systems (EEWS), the actual question to ask is if they have a potential as tools for real-time seismic risk mitigation, which implies seismology to converge alongside earthquake engineering to real-time loss reduction. In fact, although the evacuation of buildings requires warning time not available in many urbanized areas threatened by seismic hazard, if they may still be used for the real- time protection of critical facilities using automatic systems is the focus of a great deal of research. To this aim, possible interaction between EEWS and semi-active structural control is to be investigated. As a matter of fact, real-time seismology, via the rapid estimation of earthquake's features based on measurements made on the first seconds of the P-waves, allows to predict peak ground motion features of earthquake engineering interest, as the response spectrum at a site, before the quake strikes. This opens new prospects for the adoption of feed-forward control algorithms able to adapt the dynamic features of the structure to better withstand the ensuing ground motion. Nonetheless, feasibility analysis of such EEWS requires the assessment of the risk reduction and cost efficiency due to the security action. An important point, in respect to classical risk assessment, is related to the uncertainties in the estimation of the event and ground motion features, as well as their evolution in time and space. In fact, the performance target of this kind of systems is no longer only related to the maximization of the warning time. The key issue is the calibration, in a full probabilistic approach, of the alarm thresholds and of the decisional rules in order to maximize the loss reduction following the decision, which should account for costs due to false alarms. In this paper these issues, in respect of structural control for seismic early warning in the performance-based earthquake engineering framework, are discussed.