Simplified assessment of expected seismic losses for as-built and retrofitted RC buildings

Seismic risk is a key factor influencing several important decision-making process-es from performance-based design of new structures, to investments for rehabilitation of ex-isting buildings and even to seismic mitigation campaigns of large building stocks. In order to evaluate the economic convenience of alternative mitigation strategies the expected seismic losses for different solutions (including the “do nothing”) in a given timeframe should be compared. The PEER performance-based earthquake engineering framework is normally adopted in order to compute losses. However, its application with a number of Non-linear Response History analyses as a basis for assessment of expected Engineering Demand Pa-rameters and associated losses is an elaborate and time-consuming task, hardly employable for the assessment of earthquake losses for large building portfolios. This paper tests the ap-plicability of a simplified pushover based approach for computation of earthquake losses. Re-ferring to a case study building the results of application of classical PEER approach, i.e. based on Non-linear Response History analyses, are compared with the losses computed with pushover-based assessment, showing encouraging results. In addition, the simplified ap-proach is used to investigate the effect of alternative retrofit strategies on the variation of ex-pected seismic losses.