Automatic modeling method for regional seismic damage assessment of school buildings in Taiwan

Abstract This study proposes a new method for regional seismic damage assessment. Automatic modeling is applied to construct models of school buildings from a property database and component models. The capacity curves of school buildings are obtained through numerical simulation of nonlinear structure analysis instead of deriving the capacity curves by substituting parameters derived from a commonly adopted statistical regression approach into a formula. With professionally pre-set settings, detailed regional seismic damage assessment can be performed using a large number of numerical models generated in a short time. The accuracy and reliability of the proposed method is validated by comparing the base shear – roof displacement curve with data from experimental results and ETABS analysis conducted by the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering, as well as data obtained using existing damage assessment methods. Reconnaissance report data on school buildings affected in the Chi-Chi Earthquake is also used for further verification. The proposed regional seismic damage assessment method makes structural analysis on individual structures possible to provide a more accurate and detailed damage assessment.