Post-hazard Reconstruction of Building Portfolio Based on Portfolio Life-cycle Analysis

Abstract

The enormous social and economic impact from major natural hazards in recent years, e.g. Hurricane Katrina (2005) and the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011), attracts attention from decision-makers, researchers, and practitioners on how to rebuild communities damaged building portfolio after a major hazard event to enhance its performance in future hazard events in a most efficient way. The concept of Building Back Better reflects a rebuilding philosophy that will enable the community to achieve higher performance level in future hazard events. This study demonstrates how to implement BBB under the concepts of life-cycle analysis and community resilience. It firstly scales the life-cycle analysis from the individual building to the building portfolio, which quantifies the impact of specific rebuilding decision over the entire life-cycle of the building portfolio in terms of expected building portfolio life-cycle cost and expected building portfolio cumulative prospect value. Specifically, in the latter methodology, the risk-aversion of typical decision-makers can be considered that the contribution of low-probability/high-consequence events is amplified. Further, it introduces the portfolio resilience performance goal which may be de-aggregated from higher level community resilience goal that could ensure controlled functionality loss and prompt recovery from extreme hazard events. The decision framework developed in this paper can be directly applied into the post-hazard reconstruction that could support building back better under seismic hazard (or other hazards with minor modification), and help communities finally achieve pre-defined resilience goals in a most efficient way.