Prioritization of bridges and tunnels in earthquake risk mitigation using multicriteria decision analysis: Application to Lisbon

This paper presents the development of a multicriteria value model enabling the prioritization of bridges and tunnels according to their structural vulnerability and strategic importance for the formulation and implementation of civil protection policies, both for retrofitting and emergency management, in face of seismic events. An interactive structuring process was developed with a group of key-players to carefully define the evaluation criteria and the MACBETH approach was extensively used (i) to facilitate the assessment from the group of the judgmental information necessary to build value functions and (ii) to establish relative weights for the criteria. The model was subsequently explored to prioritize the bridges and tunnels of a zone in Lisbon with high seismic hazard. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.