Abstract
Cities in the developing world are facing outstanding economic and human losses caused by natural hazards such as earthquakes, and the amount of losses is affected by the quality of preventive measures and emergency management. For this reason, seismic vulnerability assessment is considered a crucial part of a strategy for seismic risk mitigation and for improving the resiliency of cities. Due to the high number of building archetypes for the seismic vulnerability assessment at a large scale, fast, simplified methods have been proposed that can facilitate the assessment procedure with low computational effort. Simplified methods can be categorized into three groups: analytical, empirical, and hybrid methods. In this study, simplified analytical methods for the seismic vulnerability assessment of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings were reviewed, starting with their classification into three main groups: collapse mechanism-based, capacity spectrum-based, and fully displacement-based methods. Finally, attention was given to the corresponding software packages that were developed to facilitate the assessment procedure.
Highlights
In the past few decades, natural catastrophes, including earthquakes, have led to a dramatic increase in human and economic losses
This study shows that the fragility curves derived from the VULNUS method are placed in the middle range between the upper limit detailed analytical methods (DAMs) and the lower limit ones derived from the empirical methods (EM) of the fragility domain [45]
Different types of simplified analytical methods (SAMs) were reviewed for the seismic vulnerability assessment of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings and were categorized into three groups: (1) Collapse mechanism-based (CMB), (2) capacity spectrumbased (CSB), and (3) fully displacement-based (FDB) by emphasizing their mechanics basis, pros, and cons
Summary
In the past few decades, natural catastrophes, including earthquakes, have led to a dramatic increase in human and economic losses. In order to decrease human and economic losses, seismic vulnera bility assessment of URM buildings is needed by national authorities at different scales. The most common methods for the seismic vulnerability assessment of building typologies at different scales aim to define a damage probability matrix [19] or fragility curves [20]. EMs are based on visual inspection of buildings in the postemergency phase and damage data obtained from observed past earth quakes [21,22,23,24,25] They refer to typological building classes or vulnera bility indexes and can be correlated with construction techniques, types of materials, and different building features [26,27,28,29,30,31]. In order to reduce time consumption and computational effort, different simplified analytical methods (SAMs) for the seismic vulnera bility assessment of URM buildings have been developed. Particular attention is given to different software packages that were developed to facilitate the appli cation of the SAMs for the seismic vulnerability assessment of URM buildings by investigating their strengths and weaknesses
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