The building rehabilitation case: protection against seismic risk

Abstract

As it is clearly known, the extra cost of the measures taken to protect a building against seismic risk is higher concerning old buildings than new designed ones. But since more than 80% of buildings were designed before the new seismic codes, it is a huge heritage waiting to manage, with great priority. The need to solve this situation became urgent with regards to many levels: the society level, the government level, budget level, etc… We witness the development of several new sophisticated methodologies that are emerging in the Civil Engineering field and Seismic Engineering field to deal with seismic risk, as one among many methods let us note the «Performance Based Earthquake Engineering - PEER PBEE Assessment method»; which is not a code - based method, and which is being developed mainly at Stanford University and University of Berkeley among others. This new method is innovative with respect to earthquake engineering (geotechnical and structural), decision analysis and management. We improved greatly the decision analysis model based on sophisticated methods. Finally as a result to all the precedent we propose a new multidisciplinary approach dealing with public and private building cases, allowing to share properly the responsibility by all (engineers, owners, authorities…), in order to convince people to rehabilitate their structures by including them in the decision analysis process. The study deals with high and small probability seismic regions. An application without restriction to the particular case of France is presented.