Overview on Risk of Earthquake Early Warning for Transportation Systems

Earthquake is a natural disaster that cannot be controlled by human beings currently. It will make major impacts on transportation, such as hindering traffic, causing fatality, and damaging properties etc. Therefore, transportation should be protected by an earthquake early warning (EEW) system. This paper envisions the application of EEW in various transportation modes and scenarios, such as highways, railways, bridges, tunnels, natural gas lines, etc. False alerts and missed-alerts are two types of risk events involved with EEW, which were frequently reported over the years. This paper presents a risk evaluation model of a false alert and a missed-alert of EEW for the transportation mode, and a method to calculate false alert rates and missed-alert rates.