Effects of probabilistic characterization of soil parameters and SSI on the seismic vulnerability of a reinforced concrete structure

This article targets two objectives: to identify the most influential sources of uncertainty by analyzing the effects of the probabilistic characterization of two soil parameters on the soil -structure interaction system. The second is to determine the seismic fragility curves of a structure by considering the epistemic uncertainty due to the correlation between v(s) and xi(g). To achieve these objectives, a 9 -story reinforced concrete structure was studied considering different soil types. The analysis of the results showed that the influence of the correlation coefficient and the coefficient of variation are not the same for all soil types. Indeed, these coefficients play a major role in estimating the structural response for very soft soils, which is less true for soft, hard and rocky soils. It has also been shown that epistemic uncertainty plays the most important role in damage assessment.