A novel urban seismic resilience assessment method considering the weighting of post-earthquake loss and recovery time

Abstract

Earthquakes impose substantial threats to the built environment of urban communities. To reduce the catastrophic consequences of earthquakes, there is an urgent need to build seismic resilient cites that can better resist seismic damage and enable a rapid post-disaster recovery. This paper gives the definition of urban seismic resilience, and establishes a seismic resilience assessment indicator system for urban built environment that integrates engineering systems, non-engineering systems and secondary disaster risk. A novel urban seismic resilience assessment method based on post-earthquake loss and recovery time is then developed to assess engineering system seismic resilience. Post-earthquake loss is divided into casualties and functionality loss. Adjustment coefficients are applied to account for the effects of non-engineering systems and secondary disaster risks on urban seismic resilience. The analytical hierarchy process is employed to calculate the weights of individual engineering systems. In the end, a city located in southern China is taken as an example to illustrate the proposed method. The assessment results suggest that the urban seismic resilience grade is Ⅱ, which means that the city can effectively resist possible future earthquake disasters.