Computational Evaluation of the Functional Loss and Recovery of Individual Buildings

A community’s resilience relies on the resilience of its infrastructure systems and the many individual buildings that form the built environment. In evaluating the resilience of an individual building, it is fundamental to quantitatively define its functionality. In this paper, the functionality and its variation of a seismically based-isolated building after a rainstorm is quantitatively assessed using a component-based framework. The overall functionality of the building is taken as the weighted average of several primary functions, which are further divided into subfunctions. Each subfunction is related to a group of nonstructural components (NCs), many of which are supported by urban utilities. Hence, the quantitative functionality is correlated with the performance of specific NCs and utilities, the damage to which can be estimated through fragility analysis in a hazardous event. The observed damage to the NCs in the building of concern following a rainstorm and their realistic recovery process were recorded and used as input in the framework. The results show that a facility that is deemed to be highly resilient to a specific hazard could exhibit poor resilience to another type of hazard and that the resilience to a particular hazard could be readily enhanced if only the hazard were anticipated.