Report - PEER - University of California, Berkeley

SEISMIC RESILIENCE OF COMMUNITIES — CONCEPTUALIZATIONAND OPERATIONALIZATIONMichel BRUNEAU 1 and Andrei REINHORN 2ABSTRACTA conceptual framework which defines the seismic resilience of communities and quantitativemeasures of resilience in a manner that can be useful for a coordinated research effort focusingon enhancing this resilience is one of the main themes at the Multidisciplinary Center forEarthquake Engineering Research (MCEER). This framework relies on the complementarymeasures of resilience: “Reduced failure probabilities”, “Reduced consequences from failures”,and “Reduced time to recovery”. The framework also includes quantitative measures of the“ends” of robustness and rapidity, and the “means” of resourcefulness and redundancy. Theultimate objective of this work is to make the concepts that are presented here adaptable for theanalysis of various critical infrastructure elements (both as individual systems and asinterrelated sets of systems) exposed to both natural and man made disasters.Keywords: Performance; Resilience; Recovery; Redundancy; Socio-economic.1. INTRODUCTIONAs part of the conceptualization of a framework to enhance the seismic resilience ofcommunities (Bruneau et al. 2003), seismic resilience has been defined as the abilityof a system to reduce the chances of a shock, to absorb a shock if it occurs (abruptreduction of performance) and to recover quickly after a shock (re-establish normalperformance), as described in Bruneau et al. (2003). More specifically, a resilientsystem is one that shows:1. Reduced failure probabilities,2. Reduced consequences from failures, in terms of lives lost, damage, andnegative economic and social consequences,3. Reduced time to recovery (restoration of a specific system or set of systemsto their “normal” level of performance)A broad measure of resilience that captures these key features can be expressed,in general terms, by the concepts illustrated in Figure 1, based on the notion that a1 Director Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research and Professor Department ofCivil, Structural, and Environmental Engineering (CSEE) , University at Buffalo, State University of NewYork, Buffalo, NY, 142602 Clifford Furnas Professor CSEE, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, 14260161