Developing a Direct Approach for Estimating Expected Annual Losses of Italian Buildings.

A new approach, referred to as the DEAL (Direct estimation of Expected Annual Losses) method, is developed to evaluate the Expected Annual Loss (EAL) of RC buildings using results of traditional structural analyses within a closed-form expression. The DEAL method is developed here to account for buildings that may be irregular in height or have differing occupancy types along their height. By comparing loss estimates for case study buildings with a rigorous application of the FEMA P58 framework, it is shown that the DEAL method performs better than the PAM approach recently proposed in Italy for seismic risk classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]