PERPETUATE

The PERPETUATE project has developed European Guidelines for evaluation and mitigation of seismic risk to cultural heritage assets. Focusing on masonry structures, the project provides robust procedures to apply performance based assessment to both single heritage assets and historic centres.

Two different scales are considered: a) the assessment of buildings at territorial scale, oriented to device mitigation risk policies; b) the assessment of single cultural heritage asset, aimed at the monitoring and design of interventions. The methodology considers a performance displacement-based approach for the vulnerability evaluation. The framework of reliability and knowledge based assessment is applied at both scales.

The project is structured in work packages (WP). Prof Dina D'Ayala and Viviana Iris Novelli lead WP6, which focuses on the identification of models for the seismic vulnerability assessment at territorial scale. Two methodologies are proposed: a new version of the numerical procedure FaMIVE, which evaluates collapse mechanisms by using a macroelement approach, and the expert tool LOG-IDEA (http://perpetuate.cs.bath.ac.uk/), which uses logic trees for the interpretation of the seismic damage. Both methodologies have been applied to the case studies of the historic centre of L'Aquila in Italy, the Casbah of Algiers in Algeria and the historic centre of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The results have highlighted the complementarity of the two approaches, which together form a robust and reliable tool for the seismic vulnerability assessment of historic city centres and buildings in clusters.

More information on the project and other project partners can be found here.

Sponsors: EU FP7 Environment Directorate

Epicentre Staff Involved: Dina D'Ayala, Viviana Novelli.