A New Approach for Earthquake Vulnerability and Damage Assessment of a Large Group of Existing Residential Buildings

Abstract eng:
This paper presents a new methodology for earthquake vulnerability assessment of a large inventory of existing buildings. It has been developed to meet the requirement for rapid, cost effective and reliable assessment of the capacities of the existing buildings, and to forecast the damages that may develop as a result of a given earthquake scenario. Vulnerability assessment of an existing building requires a lot of information regarding its structural system. In most cases there is not enough available data, if any. Collecting the required information for a large group of buildings is time consuming, expensive and therefore impractical. An engineering-rationale based approach is developed to confront with this task. The buildings topology gained from GIS databases, is carefully examined in light of additional supporting data related to local historical development, applicable codes, etc. Using this data, a "most likely" structural system is composed. This procedure can be carried out over a large inventory of buildings and serve as a base for the following structural analysis, in order to estimate the capacity of these buildings. The algorithms are integrated in a GIS database, to enable the "automatic" examination of large inventories of buildings. Implementation of the proposed approach that shows its potential has been conducted in a small town containing 1600 houses.

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