Beginning with the Year 5 Research Program, PEER established a series of PEER Methodology Testbeds. The testbeds are real facilities, inventories of facilities, or networks to which the PEER performance-based earthquake engineering assessment methodologies can be applied. The primary purpose of the testbeds is to assess the applicability of the methodologies and foster their refinement. The testbeds serve supple mentary purposes such as further focusing and integrating the research, promoting multi-disciplinary research interactions, emphasizing systems-level research, and involving interested earthquake professionals and decision makers.
The testbed study documented in this report is concerned with a hotel building in Southern California for which the primary performance issues are (a) financial losses due to structural and nonstructural damage and (b) the probability of collapse, which will dominate the life-safety issue. The building is an older reinforced concrete building re presentative of a class of buildings constructed in the 1960s in the western U.S. Instrumental records and damage from past earthquakes make it suitable for verifying analytical models and simulation platforms, while its seismic deficiencies make it suitable for rigorous implementation of the assessment methodology.
An attempt is made to illustrate how individual parts of a seismic performance assessment process can be executed in order to provide information that is needed downstream for decision making based on predicted performance. What sets the illustrated process apart from presently employed engineering approaches is the explicit consideration of important uncertainties and their propagation through the pe rformance assessment process. The study did disclose that there are gaps in knowledge, tools, and data that need to be filled in order to permit widespread implementation of probabilistic performance assessment, but that the proposed methodology is sound and will lead to performance interpretations of much value in decision making and risk management.
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