Performance-based Post-earthquake Decision-making for Instrumented Buildings

This paper presents a framework for decision-making regarding post-earthquake assessment of instrumented buildings in a manner consistent with performance-based design criteria. This framework is achieved by simultaneously combining and advancing existing knowledge from seismic structural health monitoring and performance-based earthquake engineering paradigms and consists of 1) optimal sensor placement, 2) dynamic response reconstruction, 3) damage estimation, and 4) performance-assessment and decision-making. In particular, the main objective is to reconstruct inter-story drifts with a probabilistic measure of exceeding performance-based acceptance limits and determining the post-earthquake re-occupancy classification of the instrumented building of interest. Since the proposed framework is probabilistic, the outcome can be used to obtain the probability of losses based on the defined decision variables and be integrated into a risk-based decision-making process by city officials, building owners, and emergency managers. The framework is illustrated using data from the Van Nuys hotel testbed, a seven-story reinforced concrete building instrumented by the California Strong Motion Instrumentation Program (Station 24386).