Besides structural safety issues, life cycle cost (LCC) of wood structures needs to consider functional, architectural and aesthetic effect which can be quantified by opportunity cost. As opportunity cost is unique for shear walls, it needs to be incorporated into probabilistic analysis of LCC analysis of wood frame structures. To perform probabilistic LCC analysis with the uncertainty from ground motion records and intensity measure, three methods have been implemented to solve the joint distribution of damage cost. The first method estimates damage cost from the summation of conditional distribution at given intensity measure. The second method estimates damage cost from the summation of conditional distribution of damage cost at given earthquake records. The third method implements Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the probabilistic distribution of damage cost.
Introduction
Wood frame structures are generally recognized to provide good performance for collapse prevention and other structural safety requirements in earthquakes. However, severe damage loss of wood frame structures under moderate earthquakes, such as the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, has been reported. New design criteria in addition to the traditional failure control criteria are needed to reduce damage loss of wood frame structures in significant seismic events. LCC considers the costs over the structure’s lifetime, including construction cost, maintenance cost, damage cost, cost of loss of revenue, cost of injury and death, and discounting of cost over time [1, 2]. Optimized LCC helps decision makers balance initial construction costs and potential failure consequence. LCC oriented seismic design can provide a rational approach to evaluate damage cost for performance based design.
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