A major objective of the project is to develop a multi-disciplinary, seismic-risk-evaluation framework for port systems that will incorporate models and procedures developed from the various earthquake-engineering, system-operations, and decision-guidance research tasks that comprise this project. When this framework and its various models are developed, we plan to apply the framework to a hypothetical port system to illustrate the types of results that the framework can provide and how these results can be used to guide seismic-risk-reduction decision-making. Our intent is to make our hypothetical port representative of large U.S. container ports that are the focus of our project. During the past year, we have begun to define the baseline physical and operational characteristics of the hypothetical port.

The accompanying figure shows the hypothetical port system in its current, draft form. This system includes four container-cargo terminals (with waterfront structures and backlands) that together include a total of nine berths of varying lengths. The total number of berths was selected in an attempt to strike a balance between being small enough so that the system seismic risk analyses will not be overly onerous while, at the same time, being large enough to represent a reasonable degree of system redundancy typical of a large port. The system also includes roads (that could include bridges with varying levels of seismic vulnerability) for transport of cargoes to and from the terminals via land.

In addition to the physical configuration of the port, the hypothetical port definition also includes: