Paolo Bazzurro

Paolo Bazzurro
University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia · engineering

PhD

About

154
Publications
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Publications

Publications (154)
Article
Full-text available
Understanding seismic risk at both the national and sub-national level is essential for devising effective strategies and interventions aimed at its mitigation. The Earthquake Risk Model of Switzerland (ERM-CH23), released in early 2023, is the culmination of a multidisciplinary effort aiming to achieve for the first time a comprehensive assessment...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The recent Kahramanmaraş earthquake sequence of February 2023 has shown that earthquake risk models currently in use in the (re)insurance industry are still relatively blunt tools to estimate losses across Turkey. In this paper, we first review some of the major discrepancies identified between loss modeling exercises for insurance companies in the...
Article
Full-text available
Central Asian countries, which include Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, are known to be highly exposed to natural hazards, particularly earthquakes, floods, and landslides. With the aim of enhancing financial resilience and risk-based investment, planning to promote disaster and climate resilience in Centra...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This study focuses on the seismic risk assessment of non-structural components within the reactor building of a nuclear power plant (NPP) and presents the case study of a water pump. We consider two variants of the pump: one with the fundamental period, T1, of 0.1s and the other with T1 of 0.25s. Our objective is to compare two approaches for compu...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The safety of a nuclear power plant is influenced by both aleatory randomness and epistemic uncertainty, as well as the potential inter-component and intra-component correlations. Aleatory randomness arises from inherent variability in the data, while epistemic uncertainty stems from limitations, or incomplete knowledge in models or data. Component...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In the framework of probabilistic seismic risk analysis (PRA) of nuclear power plants, a single ground motion intensity measure (IM) is generally used as a predictor of the performance of structures, systems, and components (SSCs) subject to earthquakes. In most cases, Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) is the IM of choice. Several studies have shown,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent seismic sequences have shown over again that unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings can be susceptible to the effects of cumulative damage due to repeated shaking. These effects, however, are often neglected in seismic assessment, a practice that may lead to underestimation of risk for a given building for a portfolio of buildings. Therefore,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Liquid storage tanks are critical components in the industrial sector, as large amounts of toxic, volatile, or flammable substances are stored in them. Motivated by their underlying vulnerability to physical damage caused by earthquakes, an empirical relationship is proposed to link the specific type of earthquake-induced structural damage with the...
Article
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The insurance industry has used parametric solutions to transfer catastrophe risks since the 1990s. Instead of relying on a lengthy process to assess a claim, these products pay the insured a pre-agreed amount if the physical characteristics of the event fulfill pre-defined conditions. Cat-in-a-box or cat-in-a-circle triggers, commonly used tools f...
Conference Paper
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Recent advances in Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE) have followed their own evolutionary path over the past two decades. Focusing on the assessment of conventional buildings and infrastructure, several innovative proposals on improving fragility assessment have appeared over the years, focusing on record selection, improved intensity...
Article
Recent earthquakes have shown susceptibility of unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings to damage accumulation in seismic sequences or long duration ground motions. Current structural modelling approaches commonly disregard the damage accumulation in URM buildings or they are unable to accurately capture this phenomenon unless sophisticated FEM models...
Article
Understanding the potential socioeconomic losses due to natural hazards, such as earthquakes, is of foremost importance in the field of catastrophe risk management. The construction of a probabilistic seismic risk model is complex and requires the tuning of several parameters essential to represent the seismic hazard of the region, the definition o...
Preprint
Full-text available
Central Asia is an area characterized by complex tectonic and active deformation, largely due to the relative convergent motion between India and Arabia with Eurasia. The resulting compressional tectonic regime is responsible for the development of significant seismic activity, which, along with other natural hazards such as mass movements and rive...
Preprint
Full-text available
Central Asian countries, which include Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, are known to be highly exposed to natural hazards, particularly earthquakes, floods, and landslides. With the aim of enhancing financial resilience and risk-based investment planning to promote disaster and climate resilience in Central...
Preprint
Full-text available
The countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia are highly prone to natural hazards, more specifically, floods, earthquakes, and landslides. The European Union, in collaboration with the World Bank and the GFDRR, created the program “Strengthening Financial Resilience and Accelerating Risk Reduc...
Article
Full-text available
Ground motion record selection is a standard step in state-of-the-art performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) applications. It links the structural response to seismic hazard of the site of interest. In this process, suites of hazard-consistent ground motion recordings of a wide range of intensity levels are selected (and often scaled) from...
Preprint
Full-text available
Understanding seismic risk at both the national and sub-national levels is essential for devising effective strategies and interventions aimed at its mitigation. The National Earthquake Risk Model of Switzerland (ERM-CH23), released in early 2023, is the culmination of a multidisciplinary effort aiming to achieve, for the first time, a comprehensiv...
Chapter
Full-text available
Seismic sequences are often a source of damage in unreinforced masonry (URM) and reinforced concrete (RC) buildings, which is underestimated by the standard earthquake assessment framework that is based solely on mainshock seismicity. Even when clustered seismicity is considered, buildings are assumed to be in intact conditions once any event in th...
Article
Full-text available
Design spectra are commonly defined for a constant value of hazard associated to an “ultimate” limit state (LS) of reference, typically 10% in 50 years. Given a specific structure, this approach results in different limit‐state exceedance risk levels even for sites characterized by the same design peak ground acceleration (PGA), mainly because of d...
Article
Full-text available
Conditional spectrum (CS) record selection is a standard tool for the selection of ground motion recordings consistent with the hazard at a site of interest. For many important applications the seismic hazard is computed for reference rock conditions and the effects of local site conditions are investigated downstream via soil dynamics. Ideally, wh...
Article
A methodology is proposed to enable state-of-the-art record selection using ground motion components in all three principal loading directions. Relying on the well-established Conditional Spectrum approach, its fundamental concepts are extended to ensure hazard consistency when the vertical ground motion component is considered along with the horiz...
Article
A fully probabilistic seismic hazard model with a single domain and sufficiently accurate resolution level for national analyses has been developed, for the Caribbean and Central America, to support the design of parametric earthquake policies offered by the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Financing Facility to sovereign countries. This model provides u...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Hazard consistency through adequate record selection is of paramount importance for a proper site-specific structural risk assessment in performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE). Record selection methods theoretically require selected ground motions to be consistent with those that could be generated by the earthquakes most contributing to t...
Conference Paper
The building and structure related part of the Euratom funded Project METIS (metis-h2020.eu) is focused on the evaluation of fragility curves, giving failure probabilities for increasing ground motion intensity, intensity measure selection, uncertainty quantification and bayesian updating of fragility curves. While METIS improves the methodologies...
Article
Full-text available
Recent seismic design approaches developed under the umbrella of performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) pursue pre-defined performance objectives in terms of structural response, economic losses, or casualties. The earlier PBEE methods were mainly concerned with the deterministic evaluation of performance at a single ground motion intensit...
Article
Full-text available
assessment (PSHA) of the Isfahan urban area, Iran. We compiled the required datasets including the earthquake catalogue and the geological and seismotectonic structure and faults systems within the study region to delineate and characterize seismic source models. We identified 7 relatively large zones that bound each region with similar seismotecto...
Poster
Towards European consensus on best practice approaches for seismic risk assessments of nuclear installations
Article
Full-text available
Traditionally, probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) considers only mainshock events and models their temporal occurrence through a homogeneous Poisson process. Thus, it disregards foreshocks and aftershocks, assuming they have a minor effect on PSHA. However, recent earthquake sequences, such as those in 2016–2017 in Central Italy and 2010–...
Article
Full-text available
This study applies the latest probabilistic performance-based earthquake engineering tools in terms of nonlinear dynamic analyses in tandem with hazard-consistent record selection to assess the risk of collapse of RC tall buildings in the Istanbul metropolitan area and to quantify their seismic safety margin with respect to acceptable risk levels....
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent seismic design approaches developed under the umbrella of performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE) pursue pre-defined performance objectives in terms of structural response, economic losses, or casualties. The earlier PBEE methods were mainly concerned with the deterministic evaluation of performance at a single ground motion intensit...
Chapter
Full-text available
Mathematical risk assessment models based on empirical data and supported by the principles of physics and engineering have been used in the insurance industry for more than three decades to support informed decisions for a wide variety of purposes, including insurance and reinsurance pricing. To supplement scarce data from historical events, these...
Chapter
After the recent earthquake sequences that have hit Italy, New Zealand, and other parts of the world, the evidence that damage in buildings that experienced multiple shocks is, in general, more severe at the end of the sequence than after the mainshock is even more apparent and better documented. However, analytical studies still struggle in provid...
Article
In Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering record selection comes into play at the interface of seismic hazard and structural analysis aiming to repair any loss of essential seismological dependencies caused by the choice of an insufficient intensity measure to be used for structural response prediction. Site-specific selection is best exemplified...
Poster
Full-text available
We probabilistically assess the time-dependent seismic hazard and risk observed in Oklahoma due to wastewater disposal. The seismic hazard maps illustrate the incompatibility of the regional seismic provisions with the recent seismicity. During the peak of seismicity in 2015, the seismic risk was 275 times higher than the background level, with the...
Article
Full-text available
The second part of a seismic risk assessment study for the Iranian city of Isfahan is presented, focusing on the description of the hazard, the risk analysis, and the discussion of the results. This study utilizes the building exposure model, the fragility and the vulnerability curves illustrated in the companion paper. The earthquake occurrence so...
Article
Full-text available
This paper focuses on the exposure and fragility/vulnerability of the residential, mixed residential/commercial, and public building stock of the city of Isfahan, in Central Iran, and constitutes the first part of a seismic risk assessment study for that city. To determine the assets at risk, we first summarize the details of the building stock and...
Article
Full-text available
Since the early twenty-first century, tall building construction has gained significant momentum in the urban cities of Turkey as a result of the population and economic growth. Accruing more than 1500 buildings by year 2015, the majority of the country’s exposure now clusters across the seismically active landscape of the Istanbul metropolitan are...
Article
In the past decade, Oklahoma has experienced unprecedented seismicity rates, following an increase in the volumes of wastewater that are being disposed underground. In this paper, we perform a probabilistic assessment of the time-dependent seismic hazard in Oklahoma and incorporate these results into an integrated seismic risk model to assess the e...
Article
Wastewater disposal has been reported as the main cause of the recent surge in seismicity rates in several parts of central United States, including Oklahoma. In this article, we employ the semi-empirical model of the companion article (Grigoratos, Rathje, et al., 2020) first to test the statistical significance of this prevailing hypothesis and th...
Conference Paper
Conditional Spectra (CS) based record selection is a state-of-the-art approach to select sets of records for performing nonlinear response time history analysis consistent with the seismic hazard at a specific site. So far this method has been developed and applied mainly to select horizontal components of the ground motion. There are many structur...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Current state-of-the art earthquake portfolio loss analysis practice uses the so-called vulnerability functions to estimate incurred losses (such as those due to direct repair costs, downtime or casualties) for different levels of a ground motion intensity measure of interest. Although it is recognized in the academia nowadays that for robust loss...
Article
Full-text available
Probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA), as a tool to assess the probability that ground motion of a given intensity or larger is experienced at a given site and time span, has historically comprised the basis of both building design codes in earthquake-prone regions and seismic risk models. The PSHA traditionally refers solely to mainshock ev...
Article
In current practice, most earthquake risk models adopt a “declustered” view of seismicity, that is, they disregard foreshock, aftershock, and triggered earthquakes and model seismicity as a series of independent mainshock events, whose occurrence (typically) conforms to a Poisson process. This practice is certainly disputable but has been justified...
Article
In the past decade, several parts of central United States, including Oklahoma, have experienced unprecedented seismicity rates, following an increase in the volumes of wastewater fluids that are being disposed underground. In this article, we present a semi-empirical model to hindcast the observed seismicity given the injection time history. Our p...
Article
The growth of global ground-motion databases has allowed generation of non-ergodic ground-motion prediction equations (GMPEs) based on specific on-site recordings. Several studies have investigated the differences between the hazard estimates from ergodic versus non-ergodic GMPEs. Here instead we focus on the impact of non-ergodic PSHA estimates on...
Article
The disruption of a transportation network can have a high social and economic impact on the welfare of a society, as it can significantly affect the daily routines of a community. Although many studies have focused on the estimation of physical risk in the components that compose these networks, only a limited number have analyzed their interconne...
Article
Incremental dynamic analysis (IDA) is widespread to evaluate the seismic response of structures. It employs one records set scaled to multiple intensity levels (IMLs) to estimate the structural response distribution. However, the dominating earthquake scenarios differ with the intensity, and a single set introduces bias that increases with scaling....
Article
We present correlation coefficient estimates between a number of ground motion intensity measures ( IMs), as measured from the NGA-West2 database, with focus on the correlation of vertical–vertical and vertical–horizontal ground motion components. The IMs considered include spectral accelerations with periods from 0.01 to 10 s, peak ground accelera...
Article
In recent years, the additional risk posed to the built environment due to aftershock sequences and triggered events has been brought to attention, and several efforts have been directed towards developing fragility functions for structures in damaged conditions. Despite this rise of interest, a rather fundamental component for such tasks, namely t...
Poster
Wastewater disposal has been reported as the main cause of the recent surge in seismicity rates in several parts of Central United States, including Oklahoma. In this paper, we employ a new semi- empirical recurrence model to test the statistical significance of this prevailing hypothesis, The results show that the vast majority (78%) of the seismi...
Article
Regional, multi-country seismic hazard models provide a comparison basis for national seismic hazard models that are generally used to underpin the seismic design prescriptions of national building codes. Our study presents an attempt to formalize a framework for performing such a comparison. This comparison consists of sequential steps for identif...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Due to the increasing availability of high-performance computational resources, physics-based ground motion simulations (PBGMS) are becoming viable alternatives to ground-motion recordings as input to structural response analysis. One of the primary advantages of the simulated ground motions is that they are site-specific because they reflect the s...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The 2019-2021 RINTC project is the extension of the 2015-2017 RINTC project that assessed, explicitly, the seismic risk of code-conforming Italian structures (i.e., designed according to the seismic code currently enforced). The aim of the new RINTC project is to extend the methodological framework developed in RINTC to the existing structures (des...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Recent advances in ground motion record selection for mainshock events have highlighted very clearly the critical importance of using record suites consistent with the seismic hazard at the site of interest. Nevertheless, this integral component for analytical derivation of fragil-ity models remains underscrutinized when it comes to aftershock grou...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Current seismic design code provisions are mainly based on checking structural performance at a single seismic intensity associated with a pre-defined return period. For instance, in EN1998, a ground motion with 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years is used for design. This design procedure, with the inclusion of partial safety factors, is assu...
Article
The lack of empirical data regarding earthquake damage or losses has propelled the development of dozens of analytical methodologies for the derivation of fragility and vulnerability functions. Each method will naturally have its strengths and weaknesses, which will consequently affect the associated risk estimates. With the purpose of sharing know...
Article
Several proposals are explored for the hazard and intensity measure (IM) consistent selection of bidirectional ground motions to assess the performance of 3D structural models. Recent studies have shown the necessity of selecting records that thoroughly represent the seismicity at the site of interest, as well as the usefulness of efficient IMs cap...
Article
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This paper presents and discusses some research results related to the seismic failure risk of standard, residential and industrial, buildings designed for damage, and life-safety according to the Italian seismic code, which is somewhat similar to Eurocode 8. The five considered structural typologies are as follows: masonry, cast-in-place reinforce...
Article
Pulse‐like records are well recognized for their potential to impose higher demands on structures when compared with ordinary records. The increased severity of the structural response usually caused by pulse‐like records is commonly attributed to the spectral increment around the pulse period. By comparing the building response to sets of spectral...
Article
Full-text available
This study examines the statistical correlation between the spectral accelerations of mainshock-aftershock ground motion pairs in the NGA-West2 ground motion database. Aftershock spectral accelerations are found mildly correlated with their mainshock counterparts for closely-spaced periods of vibration and weakly correlated over the rest of the per...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Nonlinear dynamic analysis is commonly used in seismic risk assessment. Record selection is the tool to connect the ground motion to the structural response through a ground motion intensity measure (IM). Naturally, appropriate record selection techniques as well as a good choice of IM have been two important research topics in the last decade. Rec...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) is a widespread approach to evaluate the seismic response of structures by means of nonlinear dynamic analysis. It employs a single set of ground motion records and scales them up until dynamic instability is reached.The objective of IDA is to obtain the statistics for different Engineering Demand Parameters (EDPs...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Pulse-like records are well recognized for their potential to impose higher demands on structures when compared to ordinary non-pulsive records. This increased building response to pulsive records is often associated with their particular spectral shape, and specifically the spectral increment around the pulse period. Still, others have argued in f...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper we present an analytical solution for the Bayesian update of ground motion estimates using macroseismic intensity (MI) observations. This solution builds on an earlier work of Ebel and Wald (Earthq Spectra 19:511–529, 2003), who proposed a discrete version of the updating problem. We show that the updated probability distribution of t...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A ground motion intensity measure (IM) represents the interface between the ground shaking intensity and structural response. An ideal IM should be efficient, sufficient and practical. The first aspect, which is the focus of this paper, encompasses the choice of an IM that exhibits an adequately low dispersion in structural response prediction. The...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Earthquake occurrence in probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) is routinely modeled by means of a Poisson process. The latter is a "memory-less" process, i.e. it maintains a constant rate in time and space. To this end, aftershock and triggered events, whose occurrence is strongly time-and space-dependent, are typically removed from the cata...
Article
Time-domain spectral matching is the most commonly used technique in earthquake engineering to obtain accelerograms for which the response spectrum is compatible with a smooth target spectrum, be it a polyline design spectrum or a hazard spectrum. These accelerograms are used for assessing the response of structures, usually beyond their linear ela...
Article
Full-text available
This study presents an open-source framework for the evaluation of the consequences of seismic events on tra