Quantification of resilience improvements for critical facilities through advanced technologies

A relevant number of critical facilities, such as hospitals, schools and city halls, experienced extensive damage that resulted in loss of their functionality, and consequently huge economic losses and slow restoration processes after earthquakes. In some communities not well organized, the recovery process can last several years and the community or the system is never brought back to the initial functionality. The awareness that damage can not be avoided has increased the attention on designing buildings that are both safe and resilient, however it is often assumed that such design can increase costs to unacceptable levels. The paper compares life-cycle costs and resilience of respectively a hospital and a school which have been retrofitted using both a moment resisting frame system and a base isolated system. Performance-based earthquake evaluation tools are used to estimate the total cost of ownership, including expenses associated with initial construction, damage repair, loss of functionality and resilience. Numerical analyses have shown that resilience of both schools and hospitals can be improved by using a seismic isolation system that will also reduce life-cycle costs and downtime with respect to a conventional fixed-based design.