Structural Resilience through Model-Based Data Interpretation: From Building to City-Scale Post-Seismic Assessment

Earthquake-design approaches in regions with low to medium seismic hazard often focus on the protection of inhabitants. Therefore, some structural damage is accepted. In addition, large parts of the building stock have usually been built without considering seismic limit states. Thus, earthquake events lead to large-scale post-earthquake assessments in order to determine the safety for occupancy of damaged buildings. Applying model-based data interpretation to earthquake-hit buildings has potential to increase assessment speed and objectivity. By accounting for uncertainties arising from multiple sources, a multiple-model approach for interpretation of ambient-vibration measurements is proposed. While ambient vibrations provide the engineer with quick and cheap measurement data, they are measurements of elastic behavior and therefore, interpretation for post-earthquake assessment must be done with great care. Outcomes of visual inspection and ambient-vibration measurements are combined in order to increase the knowledge of earthquake vulnerability of deteriorated structures and this leads to a measure of structural resilience. First, the applicability and utility of such an approach are shown for a single building. Then, we discuss opportunities (such as additional comparisons with similar buildings in a district) and limitations (high numbers of buildings to assess may result in excessive simulation times) that result from scaling the methodology up to assess entire cities.