FP3: Prioritising Earthquake Retrofitting in Wellington CBD

Strengthening buildings can minimize the earthquakes’ life safety risk. Wellington has around 800 office buildings that might have structural and non-structural seismic vulnerabilities. Given a limited budget and other constrains, prioritization of retrofitting buildings has become a fundamental topic for decision makers. Different methods have been developed to define prioritisation strategies of retrofitting building on a wide territorial scale. In this paper, we applied the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) analysis to define different propriety ranking able to satisfy different purpose. Moreover, Fuzzy TOPSIS and VIKOR are two MCDM methods are applied to compare the results. In order to help decision makers in choosing the optimal mitigation strategy with multidimensional perspective, different political and social scenarios are also defined. Based on available seismic risk information (vulnerability, seismic hazard, exposure) the prioritization can be identified. Our aims are: (1) to describe the priority scenarios based on the seismic risk. (2) to rank retrofitting  buildings based on different purpose. (3) to relate these findings to  possible lessons for policy makers when designing retrofit building strategies.