A new combined approach to prioritise seismic retrofit interventions on stocks of r.c. school buildings

This paper presents a prioritisation procedure to rank reinforced concrete (r.c.) buildings that are part of a stock according to their seismic vulnerability, and to plan further verifications and retrofit interventions. The proposed approach is based on visual inspections, qualitative evaluation, and quantitative assessment. The qualitative evaluation is based on a new deficiency form, here presented, whereas the quantitative assessment is carried out through a simplified mechanical model, which provides a ratio of capacity to demand. This work thus proposes a combination of the qualitative and quantitative approaches aimed at prioritisation. In this way, specific limitations of each approach are overcome through the combination. The proposed procedure was applied to the r.c. school building asset managed by the municipality of Padova (Italy). After describing the main characteristics of the inspected stock, the paper discusses the most commonly observed vulnerability factors and the application of the procedure. The qualitative and quantitative approaches integrated each other quite well and showed a general good agreement.