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Abstract:
Seismic exposure models are the most uncertain component in the chain of seismic loss assessments and aim to describe the built environment with information about buildings, their types and the population in them. Aggregated Exposure Models (AEM) are the most common type of exposure models, describing the built-environment in aggregates over administrative regions in which neither location nor type of individual buildings is precisely described. By combining AEMs with building parameters available from OpenStreetMap (OSM), an open geographic database updated by volunteers, we can improve the exposure model by providing location, occupancy type and also numbers of stories for many individual buildings, resulting potentially in a more precise characterization of buildings. Because seismic losses highly depend on both the location and type of each building, we explore how these OSM building parameters may alter the distribution of building types and how this can accordingly affect loss assessments. We also aim to understand the impact of each building parameter on describing building types more precisely for different countries in Europe. This impact depends on the the underlying AEMs and the local/national OSM mapping activities. Both vary strongly within Europe, so that the impact on both the exposure model and the loss assessment results are country-dependent. Our preliminary results suggest that the widespread occupancy parameter helps characterizing many buildings while the not so frequent number-of-stories parameter is more capable of deciding the building type ins many countries.
