Earthquake Probability-based Automated Decision-making Framework for Earthquake Early Warning Applications

The benefits and feasibility of Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) is becoming more appreciated throughout the world. An EEW system detects an earthquake initiation based on a seismic sensor network and broadcasts a warning of the predicted location and magnitude shortly before an earthquake hits a site. The typical range of this lead time is very short, around tens of seconds to a minute, which becomes a huge challenge for applications taking advantage of EEW. As a result, a robust automated decision process about whether to initiate a mitigation action is essential. One of the recent approaches proposes taking an action upon exceedance of a fixed threshold for an intensity measure or damage or loss measure, but the determination of the threshold value remains as an open-ended question. Other approaches propose a decision-making framework based on cost-benefit analysis. However, a general framework that can handle multiple-action decisions, lead time and its uncertainty is still missing. In this study, a more robust decision criterion based on a new cost-benefit analysis procedure is proposed as part of an earthquake probability-based automated decision-making (ePAD) framework. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate how to explicitly handle multi-action decisions and lead time uncertainty.; Summery of the ePAD framework