Seismic risk assessment of RC buildings using fuzzy synthetic evaluation

Seismic resilience of new building has improved with the implementation of recent design codes and stringent quality of construction. However, vulnerability of existing buildings is apparent from recent earthquakes as a result of older design codes coupled with inherent area of weaknesses. Hence, there is a need for a simple procedure to identify critical structures for implementation of repair and upgrade. However, the impending challenge remains to be finding required funding from a limited resource. In this article, risk-based assessment technique is proposed to quantify the building vulnerability and consequently rank the critical building. The seismic hazard, building vulnerability, and consequence of failure are handled through hierarchical structures and the relative importance between each parameter is computed using the analytical hierarchic process. The input parameters are collected through a simple walk down survey, which is prone to subjective (vagueness) type uncertainty. Hence, the vagueness uncertainty is handled using fuzzy-based techniques and aggregated through fuzzy synthetic evaluation. The efficacy of the proposed method is illustrated with the 2003 Bingol earthquake and 1994 Northridge earthquake data.