Structured Decision-Making for Seismic Risk Mitigation in Hospitals

• Main Author: Wilmot, Sarah
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/314

The purpose of this project was to develop a prototype of a decision support framework that could be used by institutions to assist with formulating and prioritizing options to increase the resilience of their infrastructure. As a prototype, the results of this project are intended to demonstrate how the framework could be structured and to provide a basis for judging the utility of this approach. Seismic mitigation of hospitals was used as a test case for the method, because of existing domain knowledge within the committee. The method could also be applied to other facilities and for other types of extreme events. This project focused on the non-structural (technical) components of buildings. Historically most efforts to improve the seismic performance of buildings have focused on the structural system; however, risk to safety, damage to property and loss of function of buildings can often result from the failure or malfunction of non-structural assets, even if the building structure performs well.