APPLICATION OF AHP TO RISK ASSESSMENT OF ASEISMIC CAPACITY OF BUILDINGS

Abstract

This study is proposed to apply the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) for risk assessment of aseismic capacity of buildings. A framework of hierarchical structure of risk assessment of a building is proposed, in which target level, major level and sub level are included. In the major level, 4 important influence factors are considered, i.e., earthquake features (EF), geological conditions (GC), structural characteristics (SC), and structural design (SD). In the sub-layer totally 15 influence factors are depicted: epicenter distance (ED), source depth (SD), earthquake magnitude (EM), tsunami potential (TP), soil property (SP), slope angle (SA), liquefaction potential (LP), fault zone (FZ), cracks and defects (CD), crack position (CP), shear resistance (SR), twisting resistance (TR), aseismic apparatus (AA), construction type (CT), and form factors (FF). After pairwise comparison matrices of each layer are constructed and analyzed by AHP, we can obtain the relative risk impact (RRI) for 15 influence factors. Then we establish assessment criteria. Finally, we apply this process to check the validity of AHP for risk assessment of 7 practical cases of buildings during earthquakes based on the overall risk index (ORI), among these cases 4 buildings were destroyed and 3 were safe. The results show that AHP is an efficient, convenient and rapid approach for quantitative risk aseismic capacity of existing buildings subjected to earthquakes.