EaRL: Toolbox for Earthquake Risk and Loss Assessment of Building Assets

Infrastructure (asset) risk management is essential for a resilient environment. Several industries are concerned to improve their building asset preparedness subject to seismic hazard. To this end, the development of software tools that quantify and assess the potential risk of our assets subject to earthquakes is essential. These tools can facilitate the decision-making for appropriate pre-disaster measures based on robust risk and loss metrics. They can also facilitate the utilization of state-of-the-art building technology such that investments, that strengthen our assets, can be prioritized in such a way that human casualties, injuries, and losses are minimized. This paper presents an interactive toolbox that facilitates story-based building-specific earthquake-induced risk and loss assessment. The toolbox builds on concepts of uncertainty quantification, and risk-based assessment methodologies within the context of performance-based earthquake engineering. It provides the loss vulnerability curves as well as expected annual losses that explicitly consider structural and non-structural repairs, losses due to collapse, and building demolition due to residual deformations in the aftermath of earthquakes. Monetary losses can be further disaggregated using a range of visualization options to help make informed design/retrofit decisions. The capabilities of the toolbox are demonstrated through an illustrative example of a conventional steel frame office building subjected to earthquake hazard.