A framework for operationalizing the assessment of post-earthquake functional recovery of buildings

Building damage after an earthquake, or other hazard event, can interrupt businesses, displace households, and significantly disrupt a community for years. As a result, policymakers and engineers are working toward new design guidelines and policies that reduce the vulnerability of the built environment through improved building functional recovery performance. This study proposes a method for assessing post-earthquake building performance states of function and reoccupancy within the architecture of performance-based earthquake engineering, targeted at US construction, making use of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) P-58 fragility and consequence models. This is accomplished by mapping component damage states to systems-level operational performance, and then to building-level performance states, through a series of fault trees. The study also proposes a repair scheduling algorithm to estimate the time taken to restore building reoccupancy or function, considering impeding factors that delay the start of repairs. The result is a probabilistic approach that extends the performance-based engineering framework to explicitly quantify post-earthquake building function performance states, thus facilitating design and mitigation decisions for recovery-based performance objectives.

Automated summary

This study proposes a method to assess post-earthquake building performance and reoccupancy, aiming to reduce vulnerability and facilitate recovery. The method maps component damage states to building performance states through fault tree analysis and estimates the time needed for repairs using a repair scheduling algorithm.