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Free keywords:
seismic risk, exposure, building stock, vulnerability, multi-hazard, taxonomy
Abstract:
Earthquake exposure describes the assets that are exposed to seismic activity and
are susceptible to be damaged. In seismic risk applications, it mostly refers to the
residential and commercial building portfolios, although in general may also include
transport infrastructure and lifelines. Providing an efficient description of a complex urban
environment in terms of the structural characteristics of buildings related to their seismic
vulnerability is challenging, considering the variety of building practices, materials and
configurations. A common approach entails the use of pre-defined building typologies,
but this may introduce a bias in the resulting models. Faceted taxonomies have been
recently introduced to provide a standardized description of buildings using a rich set
of basic attributes, but cannot be used directly for risk-related applications. We argue
that a bottom-up approach to exposure modeling might prove instrumental in increasing
the quality and reliability of risk assessment, and propose hereby a novel score-based
methodology to define and assign building classes to unclassified buildings in a sound
and transparent way. The approach can be adopted for standard building classifications
as well as for original typologies that may be more efficient in capturing the specific
features of the building stock. The proposed methodology efficiently decouples the
collection of buildings observations, typical of surveying activities, from the assignment
of risk-aimed building classes, and provides a useful tool to practitioners and engineers
involved in large-scale earthquake risk assessment. The proposed methodology has
been exemplified with a building portfolio collected in France near the geothermal plant
of Soultz-sous-Fôrets, and is used to rapidly characterize the seismic exposure of a built
environment for induced seismicity applications.
