This paper presents a conceptual framework to define seismic resilience of communities and quantitative measures of resilience that can be useful for a coordinated research effort focusing on enhancing this resilience. This framework relies on the complementary measures of resilience: “Reduced failure probabilities,” “Reduced consequences from failures,” and “Reduced time to recovery.” The framework also includes quantitative measures of the “ends” of robustness and rapidity, and the “means” of resourcefulness and redundancy, and integrates those measures into the four dimensions of community resilience—technical, organizational, social, and economic—all of which can be used to quantify measures of resilience for various types of physical and organizational systems. Systems diagrams then establish the tasks required to achieve these objectives. This framework can be useful in future research to determine the resiliency of different units of analysis and systems, and to develop resiliency targets and detailed analytical procedures to generate these values.
This paper explores the operational and physical resilience of acute care facilities, recognizing that the key dimension of acute care facilities is not a simple engineering unit. Quantification of resilience is first approached from the broader societal context, from which the engineering subproblem is formulated, recognizing that, to operate, hospitals depend intricately on the performance of their physical infrastructure (from the integrity of structural systems and nonstructural systems, lifelines, components, and equipment). Quantification relates the probability of exceeding floor accelerations and interstory drifts within a specified limit space, for the structural and nonstructural performance. Linear and nonlinear structural responses are considered, as well as the impact of retrofit or repair. Impact on time to recovery is considered in all cases. The proposed framework makes it possible to relate probability functions, fragilities, and resilience in a single integrated approach, and to further develop general tools to quantify resilience for sociopolitical-engineering decisions.
A revised procedure for the design of steel plate shear walls is proposed. In this procedure the thickness of the infill plate is found using equations that are derived from the plastic analysis of the strip model, which is an accepted model for the representation of steel plate shear walls. Comparisons of experimentally obtained ultimate strengths of steel plate shear walls and those predicted by plastic analysis are given and reasonable agreement is observed. Fundamental plastic collapse mechanisms for several, more complex, wall configurations are also given. Additionally, an existing codified procedure for the design of steel plate walls is reviewed and a section of this procedure which could lead to designs with less-than-expected ultimate strength is identified. It is shown that the proposed procedure eliminates this possibility without changing the other valid sections of the current procedure.
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