A New State-of-the-Art Platform for Probabilistic and Deterministic Seismic Hazard Assessment

A new computational platform for seismic hazard assessment is presented. The platform, named SeismicHazard, allows characterizing the intensity, uncertainty, and likelihood of ground motions from subduction-zone (shallow interface and intraslab) and crustal-zone earthquakes, considering site-specific as well as regional-based assessments. The platform is developed as an object-oriented MATLAB graphical user interface, and it features several state-of-the-art capabilities for probabilistic and deterministic (scenario-based) seismic hazard assessment. The platform integrates the latest developments in performance-based earthquake engineering for seismic hazard assessment, including seismic zonation models, ground-motion models (GMMs), ground-motion correlation structures, and the estimation of design spectra (uniform hazard spectra, classical conditional mean spectrum (CMS) for a unique tectonic setting). In addition to these standard capabilities, the platform supports advanced features, not commonly found in existing seismic hazard codes, such as (a) computation of source parameters from earthquake catalogs, (b) vector-probabilistic seismic hazard assessment, (c) hazard evaluation based on conditional GMMs and user-defined GMMs, (d) uncertainty treatment in the median ground motions through continuous GMM distributions, (e) regional shaking fields, and (f) estimation of CMS considering multiple GMMs and multiple tectonic settings. The results from the platform have been validated against accepted and well-documented benchmark solutions.