Optimization of Target Reliability Index for Building Class based on Community-level Objective

To effectively manage the seismic risk of the community, the target safety levels that the design standards are based on should be properly managed by considering total risk to the built-environment and to the community. Thus, this research aims at developing a framework for optimizing the safety target levels of buildings based on community-level objectives. However, evaluating the objectives requires consideration of functional interdependencies among different buildings. The proposed framework accommodates for these interdependencies in the risk evaluation. Furthermore, implementing a community level objective to design optimization and reliability estimation of the feasible designs, requires establishment of feasible methods to make evaluations in reasonable time. To address the issue of unrealistic computation cost in implementing optimization process in target safety level determination, the framework utilizes Artificial neural networks for structural response estimation. This framework will provide a means to enhance the decision-making towards better resilience of the communities and can serve as a feasible approach for the design standards to set target safety levels for different risk categories of buildings when several building classes are considered.