Estimation of seismic downtime for building retrofitting decision-making

Abstract

Recent research demonstrates the need for comprehensive frameworks to achieve an appropriate level of resilience (e.g., energy, seismic) of the European building stock, through integrated retrofitting interventions. Different frameworks have been proposed to identify optimal interventions when several feasible alternatives are available, considering multiple decision variables of different nature, such as social, economic, or technical. Within these efforts and frameworks, less attention has been paid to the post-earthquake recovery time of buildings and communities, thus ignoring the significance of reaching a desired recovery state (e.g., functional recovery) within a specified time frame. To overcome this limitation, this study estimates post-earthquake recovery times and uses them as one of the decision variables in multi-criteria identification of optimal retrofitting of an existing RC building. The case-study building is representative of the Italian school buildings constructed between the 1960s and 1970s and was analysed under two seismic hazard levels (moderate and high). Following the identification of the main structural deficiencies of the as-built structure through nonlinear static analyses, four seismic retrofit measures were selected. Then, the earthquake-induced downtime of each of the four retrofitted building configurations was assessed, analysing the different recovery times as a function of the seismic hazard level and the recovery state. A downtime-based metric, namely the expected annual downtime, was introduced as decision variable within an available multi-criteria decision-making framework to include the impact of downtime, rank the four retrofit measures and identify the preferable one.

Keywords

RC buildings / Optimal retrofit / Multi-criteria decision-making / Loss assessment / Downtime assessment

Relevance to resilience

When seeking to identify optimal retrofitting strategies for existing buildings, conventional multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) frameworks tend to consider various decision variables (DVs) of economic, technical, and social nature. However, they often overlook the crucial aspect of downtime and its impact on building functionality and community resilience. Mitigating the downtime impacts in future earthquakes means that research efforts should focus on allowing individuals to return to their homes while ensuring access to other vital services, such as education, healthcare, and commerce. To overcome this limitation and investigate the impact of downtime on the identification of optimal retrofitting strategies for RC buildings, post-earthquake recovery times were quantified, and the expected annual downtime was introduced as DV within an available MCDM framework. The results demonstrate the need to set multi-performance retrofitting objectives, of structural, economic, social and environmental nature, to assist cost-effective decisions, from a life-cycle perspective. This would guarantee that, following seismic events, building demolishment or high recovery times would not occur.

CRediT author statement

Gianrocco Mucedero: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Writing-original draft preparation, Writing-review and editing. Rita Couto: Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Writing-original draft preparation. Besim Yükselen: Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Writing-original draft preparation. Ricardo Monteiro: Methodology, Validation, Writing-review and editing, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition

All authors have read and agreed to the “Author Contributions”.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

The work presented in this paper was developed within the framework of the projects “ReLUIS 2024-2026 (WP5 and WP13),” funded by the Italian Civil Protection Department and “PriorBuilt - Prioritisation of the Italian regions for seismic and energy performance upgrading of the existing buildings”, funded by ReLUIS. Additionally, it was developed as part of the activities of CONSTRUCT - Instituto de I&D em Estruturas e Construções (UID/04708), CERIS (UIDB/04625), and the project SERENE (2022.08138.PTDC), all funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P./MCTES (PIDDAC).

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