Comparison of different intervention options for massive seismic upgrading of essential facilities

The seismic retrofitting of essential facilities is a typical problem of public administrations. Due to the large amount of existing and/or historic buildings with a high seismic vulnerability and the limited economic resources, it is necessary to provide efficient solutions for the structural reinforcement of these structures on a national, regional, and urban level. This paper proposes an innovative and multidisciplinary framework to choose massive interventions on a large territorial scale according to the potential benefits of the intervention in terms of reduction in expected economic losses associated with retrofitting intervention and other important aspects usually neglected in intervention strategies. The proposed framework is based on Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) analysis. It is applied to a very complex urban area: the case study is the school buildings stock (4458 buildings) in the Lima Metropolitan area, Peru. The goal of the study is arisk analysis aimed at selecting the optimal retrofitting strategy in a huge urban area. The results of this work can be considered the base for decision-makers. They could use them as a decision support tool in the seismic risk mitigation on a large territorial scale.