Damage-informed ground motion and semi-empirical fragility assessment

Calibrating parametric fragility curves via empirical damage data is one of the standard approaches to derive seismic structural vulnerability models. Fragilities based on empirical data require the characterization of the ground motion (GM) intensity at the building sites in the area affected by the earthquake producing the observed damages. This is commonly conducted via ShakeMap, that is, a map of the expected values of a Gaussian random field (GRF) of the logarithms of a GM intensity measure conditional to magnitude, location, and possibly a set of recordings of the earthquake. Once that intensity and damage data at the same sites are available, the typical approach calibrates a two-parameter fragility model. However, ShakeMap estimates are affected by uncertainty deriving from that of the GM model used to characterize it. Furthermore, such an uncertainty can be reduced by building damage data, which provide information on the shaking intensity at the sites where damage is observed. It is shown herein that if this uncertainty is not addressed, also considering the shaking information provided by damage, the estimates of the fragility parameters obtained using a median ShakeMap only can be biased, and a recommended maximum likelihood estimation procedure – which exploits the expectation maximization algorithm – is provided. These arguments are illustrated via an application considering damage data from the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake in central Italy.