Due to very hot climatic conditions
and tottering land forms, India is one of the developing
countries vulnerable to earthquakes. It is difficult to
have a mathematical model for analyzing the damage caused
by earthquake because of its complex behavior, influent
characteristics and environmental conditions. In order
to facilitate decision making and planning for earthquake
management, it is necessary to be prepared for a rapid
and knowledge-based response to provide a proper estimation
about the damage. Since no intelligent model has been proposed
in India yet, devising such a model seems to be absolutely
essential. In this paper, a Mamdani Type Fuzzy Inference
System (MTFIS) is employed for the damage analysis of earthquakes
which includes the complications of defining, assessment
and modeling the variables involved as well as handling
uncertainty. The resulting conceptual fuzzy model contains
the robustness of fuzzy systems which can adapt to various
situations.
Earthquakes are vibrations or series of
vibrations set off due to a rupture within the earth caused
by stress. Due to their suddenness of occurrence without
any forewarning, earthquakes are rated as the worst natural
hazards causing widespread damages and loss of human lives
and property due to collapse of structures or buildings.
The earthquakes cause immense destruction especially in
the populous areas. They can cause ground shaking, faulting,
landslides, avalanches, liquefaction, cracks and fissures
on the earth. The extent of damage at any given place depends
on several factors such as the magnitude, hypocenter, epicenter
distance, terrain, type of population, structural design
of the buildings, weather conditions, and time of occurrence
and so on. In the earthquake terminology (Raghvendra, 2005),
focal depth of earthquake is the depth of the
focus below the surface of the earth. Epicenter is
a point on the surface of the earth vertically above the
place of origin of an earthquake. This place is expressed
by the geographical latitude and longitude. This is the
region of earth's surface where most severe effects are
felt. The magnitude of an earthquake is a quantity
to measure the size of an earthquake in terms of its energy
and is independent of the place of observation. Intensity is
a non-instrumental measure of earthquakes. It is the rating
of the effects of the earthquake at a given place based
on the observations of the damages which are descriptive.
It is expressed in modified Mercalli Scale. In this paper,
Mamdani Type Fuzzy modeling has been developed in order
to analyze the assessment of damage of 100 numbers of earthquakes
observed in India.
Intelligent modeling in the research field
means the information on science technologies of virtual
reality, computer networking and computer simulation are
merged with the mathematical modeling technology of the
computers. Intelligent modeling methods require algorithms
which are capable of operating in ill-defined environments,
adapting to changes in the plant's dynamics as well as
environmental effects, learning significant information
in the stable manner and placing minimum number of restrictions
on the dynamics of the plant in order to operate in environments
with minimum amount of human intervention. In this paper,
specifically MTFIS modeling was developed and utilized
for the purpose of quantitative damage analysis of Indian
earthquakes. The same method of modeling was validated
with respect to the Performance Index.
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