DM to attend international earthquake engineering conference

According to Khalid Mohammed Saleh, Director of Buildings Department at Dubai Municipality, the conference is significant as it comes at a time of heightened precaution following some of the devastating earthquakes that rocked nations of the region.

He noted that Dubai Municipality's delegation to the conference is headed by Eng. Marwan Abdullah Al Mohammed, Acting Head of Building Control Section, and includes Dr. Buolam Tiliouine, Building Studies Specialist, who will present a paper on "A Numerical Investigation on Stochastic Prediction of Maximum Seismic Response of Building Structures."

He noted that the conference, organized by Supreme Civil Defence Council of Jordan in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Works and Housing and Technical Committee for Earthquakes, is attended by international and regional experts on earthquakes.

"This important event will be an opportunity for exchanging valuable information on one of the crucial issues of the building sector. We will utilize it to update our knowledge and equip our team with the latest techniques in this field,"

said Mr. Saleh.

He noted that the paper to be presented by the DM delegation deals with stochastic modeling of earthquake ground motions and its application to structural dynamics. "Although the emphasis in the seismic response of structures still remains on the deterministic procedures of which the response spectrum has a wide appeal with the structural engineer, stochastic methods provide a more rational approach to the anlaysis of earthquake structural response and to the design based on risk assessment. Furthermore, the crucial need for the application of stochastic methods arises in defining the analysis procedure for complex structures for which the commonly used SRSS method of combing modal responses is inappropriate," he noted.

Saleh added that the paper presents the main results of a numerical investigation on the probabilistic prediction of maximum dynamic response of building structures subjected to stochastic earthquake ground motion processes.