Effectiveness of seismic mitigation strategies for the Italian masonry building heritage

Abstract

The seismic events that struck Italy in the last decades have highlighted the high seismic vulnerability of the built heritage. It is therefore of utmost importance to plan and prioritize mitigation strategies that can effectively reduce the amount of economic losses and the number of casualties produced by earthquakes.This work focuses on the definition of vulnerability for Italian residential masonry buildings. Fragility curves are elaborated for a database of 445 buildings through the software Vulnus 4.0, both for the as-built configuration and different intervention solutions. These vulnerability models are then combined with hazard and exposure data within the IRMA platform (Italian Risk MAps) to elaborate seismic risk maps for Italy, which show the possible losses for different return periods and time windows. By comparing the results provided by IRMA for the as-built configuration and the retrofit cases, it is possible to quantify the effectiveness of different mitigation strategies in terms of vulnerability reduction.