Evaluation of Existing Fragility Curves

Abstract

There is a wealth of existing fragility curves for buildings and infrastructure. The main challenge in using these curves for future applications is how to identify and, if necessary, combine suitable fragility curves from a pool of curves with different characteristics and, often unknown, reliability. The present chapter aims to address this challenge by developing a procedure which identifies suitable fragility curves by firstly assessing their representativeness to the needs of the future application and then assessing the reliability of the most relevant relationships. The latter is based on a novel procedure which involves the assessment of the most significant factors affecting the robustness and quality for each fragility assessment methodology, also presented here. In addition, a decision-tree approach is adopted in order to combine more than one suitable fragility curves. The proposed selection and combination procedures are illustrated here with a simple case study which appraises the impact of different weighting schemes and highlights the importance of a deep understanding of the existing fragility curves and their limitations. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014.