Resilience-based design of urban centres: application to blast risk assessment

Current standards for the blast protection of buildings are primarily focused on the response of single components and do not provide adequate tools to quantify the overall performance of complex structural systems. Methodologies that can translate structural damage into information actionable by policy-makers are greatly needed to support the risk management process. The best efforts produced to date towards a comprehensive analysis of the built environment under blast threats can be classified under the umbrella of probabilistic risk assessment, which can provide the public with projections of casualties and economic loss. However, additional metrics are needed in order to capture the post-blast resilience of target facilities. The current study addresses the need of a unified risk and resilience framework, wherein new design criteria – the functionality loss index and the resilience indicator – are proposed as instrumental to the assessment of a building’s post-blast functionality and resilience in an integrated fashion.