Present performance based seismic design philosophy primarily aims to restrict the structural response within some prescribed limits such that the structure satisfies the desired performance. Considering the performance of modern earthquake resistant buildings observed in recent earthquakes, it could be broadly concluded that the collapse prevention objective is satisfactorily achieved in most cases. Nevertheless, the financial consequences due to the inevitable damage to structural and non-structural components of such earthquake resistant modern buildings have been found to be substantially high, and not acceptable to the stakeholders. Merely achieving the code based performance objectives (such as life safety and collapse prevention) does not satisfy the stakeholders concern when it comes to financial losses. To address this issue, FEMA P-58 (FEMA 2012) has put together a methodology based on the framework developed by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) centre (Moehle and Deierlein 2004) for seismic loss assessment of structures. Considering the enormous attention paid towards the financial loss of earthquake induced damages, the next generation seismic design is expected to be based on the criteria that minimize the financial losses in addition to ensuring life safety. Earlier, Krawinkler et al. (2004) presented how the acceptable monetary loss can be viewed as the ‘design target’ at the design level within the framework of performance based design. They further pointed out that the relationships between the monitory loss and the engineering demand parameters (EDPs) are to be developed extensively for efficient application of the loss-targeted design. Later, Dhakal (2010) proposed the concept of the loss optimization seismic design (LOSD). He conceptually presented how the widely used performance criteria, such as immediate occupancy or the collapse prevention, can be satisfied in the LOSD framework even without explicitly defining and checking for those performance criteria during the design. The need for easily understandable (for the nontechnical stakeholders such as owner, insurer or common user) performance objectives is growing rapidly after each earthquake occurrence; and minimisation of seismic losses (financial or otherwise) has emerged as an easily understandable and widely acceptable design criteria. Therefore, the concept of LOSD needs to be developed further to cater a seismic design approach that is acceptable to and meets the expectation of all stakeholders

Collapse Prevention; Earthquake Resistant Buildings; Engineering Demand Parameters (Edps); Financial Losses; Framework; Life Safety; Loss Optimization Seismic Design (Losd)