During past few decades, seismic design practices have significantly advanced to achieve better preparedness against probable earthquake events. It is reported that most of the modern buildings, in the regions where modern seismic design practices are already in use, succeeded to achieve the life safety limit state during last few earthquakes (Canterbury earthquake 2010, 2011, South Napa earthquake 2014, Chile Earthquake 2015). However, the financial losses associated with every earthquake damaged buildings are enormous. Seismic loss assessment procedure following the PEER performance based design framework has been adopted and developed considerably during the last decade. The loss assessment tool PACT is already in use to estimate the probable seismic loss for buildings. Several other efforts have been made towards effective estimation of expected seismic losses during design life of a building. Nevertheless, use of the currently available tools requires substantial computational effort and prior knowledge of the loss assessment framework. For a designer without any background of seismic loss estimation, it is difficult to follow the current loss assessment framework or to use the available computer tools. Therefore, there is a serious need to develop a framework to rapidly estimate the expected seismic loss associated with a building within its design life. Herein, the preliminary development of a loss estimation framework is presented that enables the designer to estimate the expected seismic loss with little additional effort. Essentially, the framework is based on the concept of floor level loss estimation methodology reported in the existing literature. In Loss Optimization Seismic Design (LOSD), the designer can quickly estimate the seismic loss and revise the design to restrict the loss within a limit as prescribed by the stakeholders. The normalized losses per unit floor area of typical office building, at different level of inter story drift ratio and floor acceleration, are presented as examples of expected floor level loss functions. During the development of the generalized loss functions typical components, which primarily contribute to the seismic loss in an office building, are duly considered. The distributions of the components in office building are developed from the construction data collected through a rigorous field survey throughout Christchurch city, supplemented with available information in various literature. A designer, without any prior knowledge of the seismic loss estimation framework, can use the developed generalized floor level loss functions to estimate the expected seismic loss for a given hazard level within the current time frame of design process. The applicability of the generalized loss functions is verified with detailed loss calculation for a typical office building. It is observed that the developed generalized loss functions can estimate the expected seismic loss with reasonable accuracy. However, further investigations are required to increase the accuracy of the loss estimation using the generalized loss functions.

Earthquake; Generalized Loss Function; Losd; Pact; Seismic Loss Assessment.