An Ounce of Prevention: Probabilistic Loss Estimation for Performance - Based Earthquake Engineering

Performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) is a methodology that incorporates performance levels into the design process. Performance in PBEE can be expressed economic terms, or as elapsed downtime, or in terms of life and building safety . These performance objectives are relevant to various types of stakeholders. should be addressed in building loss estimation procedures because after an , the repair cost will not be the only "loss" suffered by building stakeholders. In sizeable earthquake, there will likely also be some losses due to business interruption the repair effort, building closure taken as a post-earthquake safety precaution, and casualties caused by building failures during the seismic event. analytical approach for PBEE is developed and implemented to evaluate the of a new reinforced-concrete moment-frame office building. The PBEE used is consistent with the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) 's modular framework, which is divided into four core analytical stages: hazard , structural analysis, damage analysis, and loss analysis. Future losses of the are uncertain because they depend on uncertain quantities, such as the shaking of the earthquake, the mechanical properties of the facility, and the uncertain and unit repair costs of the facility. An analytical approach is developed to these uncertainties. This work presents the mathematical foundation for the and loss analyses, and a description of its implementation into software. The from running this software on multiple design variants of the building are presented, seismic vulnerabilities as a function of shaking intensity and corresponding annual losses. methodology developed and implemented in this work estimates the direct economic due to repair costs as well as two types of indirect economic losses, those produced building downtime and by human fatalities. A procedure for a virtual inspection is used assess the safety of buildings, based on current damage assessment guidelines. , a model is established to estimate human fatalities caused by the partial and collapse of buildings, using probabilities of fatality based on relevant empirical data the results of the virtual inspection process. A simplified methodology is presented for building downtime after seismic events, including mobilization delays before begins and the elapsed time needed to repair damaged building components. losses due to downtime and human fatalities are then added to the building repair cost order to estimate the total building loss, which is then used to perform a benefit-cost of the benchmark building. The work presented, is to our knowledge, the most attempt to estimate the main decision variables (termed the 3 Ds-dollars, deaths, downtime), proposed by PEER and the ATC-58 Project for performance assessment of .