Developing a Direct Approach for Estimating Expected Annual Losses of Italian Buildings

ABSTRACT

A new approach, referred to as the DEAL (Direct estimation of Expected Annual Losses) method, is developed to evaluate the Expected Annual Loss (EAL) of RC buildings using results of traditional structural analyses within a closed-form expression. The DEAL method is developed here to account for buildings that may be irregular in height or have differing occupancy types along their height. By comparing loss estimates for case study buildings with a rigorous application of the FEMA P58 framework, it is shown that the DEAL method performs better than the PAM approach recently proposed in Italy for seismic risk classification.

KEYWORDS:

• Expected annual loss
• simplified loss assessment
• performance-based earthquake engineering
• seismic performance assessment
• reinforced concrete buildings

Acknowledgments

This work has been carried out within the Line 7 of the ReLUIS/DPC 2014–2018 research program, dealing with Displacement-based approaches for the evaluation of seismic losses of buildings in pre- and post- rehabilitation conditions. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the RELUIS Consortium for this research. The last author also acknowledges his role in this project was partially supported by QuakeCoRE, a New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission-funded Centre (QuakeCoRE publication number 0459).