in the current engineering practices, buildings are commonly designed for an effective lifetime of 50 years. this lifetime can increase the cost of buildings with short lifetimes and can reduce the safety level of buildings with large lifetimes. in this paper, a “service-life factor” has been defined. applying this factor into the nominal values of live, earthquake, wind, and snow loads, the ef...

The main objective of this research is to find the extent to which the minimal variability Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) model of seismic vulnerability assessment is sensitive to variation of optimism degree. There are a variety of models proposed for seismic vulnerability assessment. In order to examine the efficiency of seismic vulnerability assessment models, the stability of results coul...

Recent advances in the development of a wave travel time methodology for earthquake damage detection in buildings, for use in rapid assessment of structural health following an earthquake, are reviewed. Its main advantages over the modal methods are the insensitivity to the effects of soil-structure interaction, local nature, and robustness when applied to real structures and strong earthquake ...

According to the features and demands of earthquake rescue on-site, automatic modelling and scene generation methods based on fundamental geographic data were investigated, and an earthquake scene model was proposed considering both effect of local site conditions on ground motion and vulnerability of different buildings. Based on ArcGIS Engine, the system in which the scene of pre-earthquake a...

The aim of this article is to present a computer-aided comprehensive strategy for the rapid visual inspection of buildings and the optimal prioritization of strengthening and remedial actions that are necessary prior to, and after, a major earthquake event, respectively. Based on the visual screening procedures used in the United States and past experience in seismic assessment of buildings in ...

0099-1112/11/7710–1011/$3.00/0 © 2011 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Abstract This paper uses GeoEye-1 imagery and airborne lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) data to map buildings and their rubble in Port-au-Prince caused by the Haiti earthquake on 12 January 2010. This is achieved by performing an objectbased one-class-at-a-time land cover classification of the image ...

This paper presents the evaluation of seismic performance and cost-effectiveness of a multiple slim-type damper system developed for the vibration control of earthquake excited buildings. The multiple slim-type damper (MSD) that consists of several small slim-type dampers and linkage units can control damping capacity easily by changing the number of small dampers. To evaluate the performance o...

A noticeable feature of many earthquake-prone cities such as Kobe (Japan), Izmit (Turkey), Nice (France), Mexico City, Los Angeles etc., is that they are partially or wholly built on soft soil. A straightforward 1D analysis (which takes no account of the presence of the buildings) shows that the soft layer increases the seismic vulnerability of the city in that it is responsible for amplificati...

AIM To assess the risk factors for deaths and injuries caused by earthquakes in a high-risk earthquake zone. METHODS A cross-sectional study was carried out in Eber town, Cay County, following the earthquake of February 3, 2002 in Afyon, Turkey. This area was particularly affected by the earthquake, with high number of casualties, including many fatalities. The study included 812 persons livi...