Probabilistic evaluation of seismic resilience for typical vital buildings in terms of vulnerability curves

Abstract

Since the societies are continuously exposed to a range of natural disasters such as earthquakes, several precautions must be taken before and after an earthquake to reduce the damages. In this regard, seismic resilience evaluation is considered to be one of the practical actions. Resilience, as a function, indicates the capacity to maintain the level of efficiency or functionality about a given particular building, bridge, or vital network of a community during a defined period which could be determined by the community or the experts in this field. In this paper, a typical hospital was selected as a representative of a vital building. Following that, for incremental dynamic analysis, 22 records were selected based on the distance from the fault. In the next stage, a coefficients-based method was applied to obtain the fragility curves. Furthermore, the vulnerability curves were directly derived from the fragility curves which are the basis for calculating the loss function and seismic resilience index. The results indicate that vulnerability curves could be considered as powerful tools for evaluating the seismic resilience of vital building with an acceptable degree of precision.