PSI - Issue 78

Caterina Carbone et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 1175–1182

1178

campaign in the epicentral area of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake, regardless of owner’s request, thirty -six municipalities resulted fully inspected (CR>0.9). Conversely, following the 2012 Emilia seismic sequence and the 2016-2017 Central Italy seismic sequence, surveys were carried out only upon owner's request; therefore, only three municipalities in Emilia and ten municipalities in Central Italy were fully inspected, respectively. Despite the availability of several typological, geometrical and construction attributes from the AeDES form, this work investigated the effects of age of construction and of building height only, consistently with the available exposure data. Hence, all survey forms missing information useful for subsequent statistical elaborations (i.e. age of construction, number of storeys and damage assessment) were excluded from datasets. Considering the historical evolution of seismic design codes and consistently with features of the AeDES form, three ages of construction were identified: before 1982, 1982- 2001 and post 2001. Overall, the 2009 L’Aquila dataset, the 2012 Emilia dataset and the 2016-2017 Central Italy dataset resulted in 8693, 1872 and 6255 RC buildings, respectively. Categorization of each dataset according to age of construction and number of storeys is shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Spatial distribution with identification of age of construction and number of storeys of surveyed buildings affected by the L ’Aquila 2009 earthquake (a), the 2012 Emilia seismic sequence (b) and the 2016-2017 Central Italy seismic sequence (c).

A global damage level was assigned to each inspected building, adopting the six grades of the European Macroseismic Scale EMS-98 (Grünthal et al. 1998). Consistently with previous works (Rosti et al. 2021; Rosti et al. 2022), the global damage level was defined as the maximum damage observed in either vertical structures or infills/partitions. Damage assessment of vertical structures and infills/partitions available from the survey form were converted into EMS-98 grades, using the damage conversion rules proposed by Rota et al. (2008) and by Del Gaudio et al. (2017), respectively. Fig. 3 identifies surveyed buildings based on damage level observed at vertical structures and infills/partitions. Note that damage to infills/partitions is the major contribution to the global damage level. As pointed out by Karababa and Pomonis 2011, the derivation of empirical fragility curves requires to properly consider the negative evidence of damage. Hence, like other studies (e.g. Rosti et al. 2021, Rosti et al. 2022), non surveyed buildings located in low ground shaking areas were assumed as undamaged. Considering the completeness of the 2009 L’Aquila survey campaign, integration of damage dataset with exposure (undamaged) data was necessary to properly constrain the fragility curves in the low-motion range. The amount of exposure data to be integrated with the other damage datasets was established so that seismic vulnerability of older buildings, estimated by separately processing the datasets, could be comparable. After consideration of undamaged bui ldings, the 2009 L’Aquila exposure dataset, the 2012 Emilia exposure dataset and the 2016-2017 Central Italy exposure dataset resulted in 74617, 42169 and 186187 RC buildings, respectively. Like Rosti et al. (2021) and Rosti et al. (2022), ground motion severity was locally characterized by the value of PGA estimated from the median INGV ShakeMaps (Michelini et al. 2020) and without considering the uncertainty of