Decision criteria for Earthquake Early Warning applications

The recent large earthquakes have emphasized the importance of earthquake loss mitigation and how earthquake early warning (EEW) systems can help. 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 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. Recent approaches propose 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. 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 and an example is presented.