3rd Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 3CroCEE

Seismic vulnerability assessment is a comprehensive process that involves evaluating the susceptibility of structures to potential damage or failure during seismic events. This assessment is crucial for understanding and mitigating the impact of earthquakes on structures. Still, it is necessary to emphasize that vulnerability assessment is not a singular procedure: it varies based on the scale of analysis and the specific goals of the assessment. Conducting such assessments requires significant technical expertise as well as human and financial resources, which are often limited. These challenges are particularly evident in historic urban areas due to the unique characteristics of historical buildings, including complex materials, construction techniques, and the difficulty of quantifying their cultural value and significance. Recent decades have seen significant advancements in vulnerability assessment methods, driven by technological progress in seismic event detection and structural analysis software. Previously, earthquake information was largely limited to qualitative descriptions in historical records.
Methods for assessing structural vulnerability can be categorized into empirical, analytical, expert-based, or hybrid approaches. Initially, macroseismic methods were the most widely used. These methods are based on observed earthquake damage, making them relatively straightforward to apply, even on a larger scale. In contrast, analytical methods focus on determining the structural response, which requires more computational and time effort. Analytical methods are further divided into detailed and simplified approaches, with the latter split into three subgroups: collapse mechanism-based methods, capacity spectrum-based methods, and fully displacement-based methods.
The paper discusses the existing vulnerability assessment methods presented by various authors, emphasizing the advantages and disadvantages of each and examining their practical applications.