Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DatA ESPerT (Database Analysis for Evaluation of Seismic Performance Assessment Tools)
Berichtszeitraum: 2017-06-16 bis 2019-06-15
The modern European society is a complex human system. Most of our everyday activities require the satisfaction of necessary initial conditions to which we often do not think about. Unpredictable events, as earthquakes, pose a serious threat to the delicate equilibrium of our way of living. An example is represented by the disastrous Emilia-Romagna seismic sequence. Emilia-Romagna is a modern and productive Italian region, that in May 2012 was struck by a series of medium-high intensity earthquakes. As a consequence, there were 28 casualties and circa 300 people injured. Furthermore, vast damage was provoked to structures, infrastructures, cultural heritage and production systems. The total assessed economic loss in the region was up to EUR 13.2 billion, of which 2.4 billion in some way related to business activities. The destruction of production systems provoked a slowdown in the national economy. In order to face the emergency and distribute financial compensations, the local public authority, Regione Emilia-Romagna (R E-R) started a funding programme to help both private citizens and business owners. Regarding the latter, a programme so-called SFINGE was launched, and a dedicated database was created. Project DatA ESPerT (DE) is built upon such database, thanks to the collaboration of RWTH and R E-R. The issue the experienced researcher (ExR) has to face is about improving the understanding of socio-economic consequence of earthquakes, starting from the data they generate. The final aim of this project is to provide designers, stakeholders and public officials, with modern, data-based, consequence assessment tools they can use in strategic decision making. The DE scientific initiative was defined within the framework of an existing theoretical methodology so-called “Performance Based Earthquake Engineering” (PBEE). The main problem of PBEE is that, despite the rigorous mathematical framework upon which is built, there is a chronic lack of empirical data to validate and test the developed models. DE, as a project proposal, was written with this issue in mind. The importance of project DE for society is directly proportional to the relevance, for both Italy and Europe, of disastrous seismic events that periodically strike the peninsula. In the last 25 years alone, at least 5 disastrous seismic events struck Italy, provoking immense human and economic impact: Hundreds of casualties, thousands of injured people, and billions of euro in losses. On one hand, earthquakes can’t be predicted nor avoided; on other hand, seismic protection of buildings requires up-to-date, calibrated, consequence assessment models, so to properly and rationally allocate financial resources. DE is aimed at letting decision makers and stakeholders know more about the seismic economic consequence, thus improving the strategies for resources allocation in seismic retrofitting.
"Project DE was carried out according to the planned work packages, the Grant Agreement and the German laws. The financial management of the project was successful also thanks to the support of the hosting institute’s internal resources. The planned collaboration with the public institution R E-R was fully successful: Six short visits took place during the 2-year period; in this way the ExR had direct access to the primary source of information for his work. In total, in DE there were six work packages (of which one regarded dissemination). After studying the obligations and the rights of a MSCA fellow, the ExR created a management system so to to correctly classify all different kind of project’s documents, and to have a clear view of both time and money resources available. Among the initial activities, the ExR discussed a career development plan with both the project supervisor and the head of the hosting institute. The first research step was dedicated to studying bibliography regarding damage states of industrial buildings. At the same time, the ExR focused on the topics of statistics, probability, and risk. An intense literature review about PBEE was also carried out. After this, the ExR started investigating the database that was provided to him by R E-R. Then, the ExR spent a lot of time in extracting consistent information from the database. This required long knowledge discovery sessions, that were partially performed at the headquarters of the data owner. This phase regarded the “Operations on database and data mining” work package, and made possible writing a first journal publication. The ExR then started working on “Consequence functions by real event data”. Consequence functions were indeed obtained, thanks to the discovery of a subset of the main R E-R’s database, that has high internal consistency and information granularity. This lead to a second journal publication. During the secondment phase, the ExR had the opportunity to learn the way earthquake economic losses are studied in a re-insurance companies. Work package number 4 (“Consequence functions by real event data”) was concluded, with the envisaged results, at the end of 2018. As of January 2019, the ExR started work package #5, whose results made possible to write a third scientific publication. In it, the results of the whole project are put together so to provide the PBEE community with a solvable convolution integral, thanks to which the expected value of the reconstruction cost can finally be practically calculated."
Project DE actually succeeded in providing an original contribution to the problem of seismic consequence economic assessment on existing industrial buildings. At the state of the art, a consistent theoretical framework exists, to which many scientists refer worldwide: PEER’s PBEE. One problem of this framework is the lack of reliable and consistent data about seismic economic consequences to be used for calibration. To this regard, R E-R’s database represented an astonishing opportunity to make PEER framework improve. Thanks to a special scientific agreement between RWTH and R E-R, DE was the only research project to have an official access to the database. Project’s results could be integrated into the PEER’s framework and may serve in the future for seismic consequence mitigation and decision making in building retrofitting strategies. The societal impact of this can be huge: The earthquakes that recently struck Europe, provoked hundreds of casualties, thousands of injured people and billions of euro in economic losses. In this sense, there is plenty of room for improvement and DE may help significantly in assessing the consequences in advance. The main scientific results of project DE can be considered the following: Quantification of the actual economic impact of a medium-high intensity earthquake on industrial buildings; understanding of relative distribution of economic losses among the different business sectors; creation of statistical models for unitary reconstruction costs, as a function of actually occurred damage pattern; creation of statistical models for industrial buildings’ damage patterns, as a function of ground motion intensity measures. The results reported above allow any potential user to practically calculate, for socio-economic conditions and structures similar to those of Emilia-Romagna, the expected value of reconstruction cost in a given time span. This allows any stakeholder to quantify, in terms of euro to be spent in reparations, the performance of existing buildings.