Impact of displacement demand reliability for seismic vulnerability assessment at an urban scale

This paper addresses seismic vulnerability assessment at an urban scale by focusing on the displacement demand determination for building damage prediction. The study is based on the comparison of urban seismic damage distributions obtained by the displacement demand computed using non-linear time-history analysis (NLTHA) with three simplified methods. These methods include the N2 method, the Lin & Miranda proposal and an optimized version of the N2 method. Comparing the different damage distributions from the three simplified methods with the one obtained by time-history analysis helps understanding the reliability of displacement demand determination. The study is carried out on Sion and Martigny, two typical Swiss cities. For the case of Sion, results clearly show that using N2 method may lead to significant overestimation of damage grade distribution. The use of Lin & Miranda method and optimized version of N2 improves the damage prediction in both cases. For the other studied case of Martigny, N2 method and Lin & Miranda proposal are not accurate. The optimized version of N2 method provides stable and reliable results.