Consideration of Resilience of Communities in Structural Design

The paper addresses a design methodology for civil engineering structures, “Resilience-Based Design (RBD)” which evolves from the Performance-Based Design (PBD). Currently engineers approach a structure as if it stands alone, without considering the interaction with the community, which should be regarded as an integrated part of the design process. Indeed, a building structure or a bridge should not be considered anymore alone, but as a group of structures using a “Portfolio Approach” which would allow regional loss analysis. Such approach moves from the concept of “housing units” to the concept of “housing blocks”. The goal of RBD is to make communities as “resilient” as possible, developing technologies and actions that allows each structure and/or community to regain its function as promptly as possible. A framework for disaster management, based on open-closed loop control strategy is introduced to integrate the resilience from structures to community and to decision system applied in the design. The fundamental concepts of community resilience are analysed and a common reference framework is established which is based on the acronym “PEOPLES”, explained further in the paper. Emphasis is given to hazard intensity measures, engineering demand parameters while a performance matrix defining the performance limit thresholds of RBD is proposed. Some applications are shown incorporating both performance and resilience objectives in order to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed strategy.