Simplified strategies for a quantitative seismic vulnerability assessment of healthcare structures

Hospitals are highly complex buildings, due to the presence of technological equipment and facilities, and critical scenarios can arise in case of natural events as earthquakes. In fact, these structures are characterized by safety issues that concern both the construction characteristics, the contained equipment as well as the performed activities and functions. Therefore, it is important to carry out integrated evaluations, considering both the aspects of safety and functionality, to identify the key elements that can support decision-makers in the definition of organization and management strategies. The present work is part of the ASSIST project, which is aimed at the development of tools for the assessment and monitoring of building structures for healthcare services, with the goal to reach a framing perspective and an overall strategic vision, useful to correctly define the financial investments over several years. In the complexity of the problem, one of the main elements to be considered for the evaluation and control of building structures is related to the seismic safety of buildings. This information is in fact a priority and it is essential to properly operate the choices of possible interventions to improve the safety level; it is a strategic issue for a proper planning of investment interventions on the entire building stock. Moreover, in building structures with economically important plant content, evaluation of seismic safety should always be made by considering the interaction of the response with the functionality of the plants and more generally with the other non-structural elements. In the present paper, two simplified methods for the seismic assessment of reinforced concrete buildings are developed in parallel by two different research units. Both methods evolve from a previous experience in the same geographic area on school structures and have now been modified to take into account the complexity of hospital buildings. The simplified strategies allow to assess the seismic capacity of buildings using very few data and through a quick analysis. This way, it is possible to obtain a ranking of buildings based on their seismic capacity. With this data, the decision-makers can redistribute the limited available resources to perform specific and more in-depth vulnerability analysis. The developed methods are applied to a few pilot case-studies, comparing the results with more detailed finite-element push-over analyses. Results highlight a good reliability of the methods. In all cases, they are conservative and capable to correctly define a priority order based on the seismic vulnerability of the buildings. The simplified analyses, applied in a homogeneous and coordinated way on all the buildings, allow a correct comparison. Together with data on other aspects of safety and functionality, this information is important to properly address the use of resources.