UCLA

Natural disasters pose significant challenges to the built environment, communities, and economies. The ability to quantify regional-scale risk and resilience of building inventories is one of the critical components needed to address those challenges and bolster community resilience. Historically, the mandated building design codes have been governed by life-safety standards with no emphasis on other metrics such as economic loss and downtime. However, recent advancements in earthquake engineering have put in motion a national-level initiative to explicitly codify functional recovery as a target performance objective. While the importance of this effort has been broadly acknowledged by stakeholders, engineers, and policymakers, there is a need to develop computational workflows to assess the performance and evaluate the cost-benefit implications of these resilience-based standards at the regional scale. It is with this vision in mind that this study develops a suite of efficient computational frameworks. The regional frameworks are grounded in probabilistic performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) methodology. First, an end-to-end platform (dubbed “Auto-WoodSDA”) is developed to automate the entire PBEE methodology, from code-confirming design to nonlinear structural analyses, and economic loss and function recovery assessment. Utilizing Auto-WoodSDA and advanced statistical analysis, the robustness of the PBEE methodology is evaluated by 1) quantifying the uncertainty induced by probability model misspecification and 2) identifying the optimal ground motion intensity measure for structural response estimation of woodframe structures. Second, a set of scalable computational frameworks is proposed to assess regional risk and resilience of large-scale building inventories. They harness automation, high-performance computing, and optimization to render regional-scale assessments computationally feasible and reduce runtime from months to days. Finally, a case study is presented on a risk-based seismic loss and functional recovery evaluation of more than 15,000 residential woodframe buildings in the City of Los Angeles. The results of a sensitivity study that examines the implications of alternative seismic design parameters suggest that resilience-driven performance objectives are within the realm of possibility.