Development of a Displacement-Based Method for Earthquake Loss Assessment

FUORI CATALOGO

This report presents a displacement-based earthquake loss assessment procedure (DBELA) for the estimation of direct losses due to structural and non-structural damage of reinforced concrete buildings caused by strong ground shaking or liquefaction-induced ground deformations.The main concept of DBELA is to compare the displacement capacity of the building stock and the imposed displacement demand from a given earthquake scenario. The methodology aims to combine, in a transparent manner, good correlation with damage, ease of calibration to varying building stock characteristics, theoretical robustness, computational feasibility and a framework for the systematic treatment of all sources of uncertainty. The methodology can be adapted (through modification of the representation of the variability in the seismic demand) for use with a single earthquake scenario, which can be of use for emergency response or disaster planning, or for the consideration of all possible earthquake scenarios which could impact upon the urban areas of interest. Applications of the methodology are carried out to a test case loss model in the Marmara Region in order to study the impact of both aleatory variability and epistemic uncertainty on the loss results. Finally, the use of this methodology for the calibration of future seismic design codes is proposed.