Vibrations in buildings impact the behaviour of structures and humans, for sourcesdefined as internal or external to the building. Besides the comparison of vibrations tofixed limits, the choice of a relevant indicator is unavoidable and this indicator isdefined differently according to the selected reference text. Various standards (ordirectives similar to standards) exist and this paper focuses on the most important andthe most used ones, for ground vibrations induced to buildings or for human exposureinside buildings. In addition to the interest of comparing values to well-defined andwell-known limits, the knowledge of these standards allows the use of suitable indicators.Various vibration signals are used, from a simple harmonic signal to complex vibrationsgenerated by railway traffic, in order to present a relevant analysis of severity of eachnorm. It turns out that criteria noticeably vary from one reference to another one, andthat the thresholds are different for each standard.

A systematic procedure is developed to calculate ground vibration at any specific location in layered medium due to harmonic loadings applied at a circular plate on the medium. In the procedure, the technique decomposing the interaction tractions between excited plate and layered medium will be employed. The decomposed tractions will automatically match boundary values of general solutions of three dimensional wave equations in cylindrical coordinates. In numerical results, the effect of layered stratum on ground vibration will be investigated and how ground vibration in layered medium decreases with depth will be presented. Also, from the numerical results, one can observe ground vibration may not decay monotonically along distance away from vibration source. The presented scheme is proved to be effective and efficient for accurately predicting near-field ground response to harmonic loadings applied at a rigid circular plate on layered medium. Comments on the presented scheme and numerical results will be given.