Performance-Based Comparison of Different Storm Mitigation Techniques for Residential Buildings

Abstract

In recent years, severe hurricanes have caused enormous economic losses for society and placed tremendous burden on the insurance industry. As the number of residential buildings in hurricane prone regions continues to rise, hurricane hazard mitigation is of paramount importance for residential buildings. Although different retrofit measures are available to mitigate hurricane damage and to reduce the associated social and economic losses, choosing the most cost-effective ones is still an engineering challenge. This paper uses the performance-based hurricane engineering (PBHE) framework with multilayer Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) for the loss analysis of residential buildings subject to hurricane hazard. A highly efficient modified version of the multilayer MCS technique based on copula is proposed for the faster re-evaluation of hurricane risk when different hurricane hazard mitigation strategies are considered for the same building. This technique is combined with cost-benefit analysis to provide effective decision making tools based on the performance comparison of different design and retrofit solutions. A realistic case study is presented to illustrate the proposed methodology by comparing the cost-effectiveness of several commonly used hurricane hazard mitigation techniques and design alternatives for a typical residential building.