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Guidelines for Empirical Vulnerability Assessment

Report

These Guidelines provide state-of-the-art guidance on the construction of vulnerability relationships from post-earthquake survey data. The Guidelines build on and extend procedures for empirical fragility and vulnerability curve construction found in the literature, and present a flexible framework for the construction of these relationships that allows for a number of curve-fitting methods and ground motion intensity measure types (IMTs) to be adopted. The philosophy behind the design of the framework is that the characteristics of the data should determine the most appropriate statistical model and intensity measure type used to represent them. Hence, several combinations of these must be trialled in the determination of an optimum fragility or vulnerability curve, where the optimum curve is defined by the statistical model that provides the best fit to the data as determined by a number of goodness-of-fit tests. The Guidelines are essentially a roadmap for the process, providing recommendations and help in deciding which statistical model to attempt, and promote trialling of models and IMTs.
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