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poor construction or maintenance, of design
inconsistencies or of the shear magnitude of the
natural phenomena themselves. Rapid network
degradation following these disasters can severely
impact both short and long run operations resulting
in increased fatalities, difficulties in population
evacuation and the supply of clean water and food
to the affected areas. Much of the state of the art
in this research area indicates that attention must
be given to three important actions: (i) Fail-safe
design and construction of infrastructure facili-
ties; (ii) Effective maintenance and management
of the available facilities; and, (iii) Planning and
preparing actions to deal with rapid reparation
of infrastructure following the disasters (Altay
et al. 2006, Dong et al., 1987, Peizhuangm et
al. 1986, Tamura et al., 2000, Mendonca et al.,
2001, Mendonca et al., 2006, Karlaftis et al. 2007,
Lagaros et al., 2011).
The second part of the chapter focuses on is-
sues that are related to inspecting and repairing
infrastructure elements damaged by earthquakes, a
highly unpredictable natural disaster of consider-
able importance to many areas around the world.
An explicit effort is made to initiate the develop-
ment of a process for handling post-earthquake
emergency response in terms of optimal infrastruc-
ture condition assessment, based on a combined
Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) - Ant Colony
Optimization (ACO) framework. Some of the
expected benefits of this work include improve-
ments in infrastructure network restoration times
and minimization of adverse impacts from natural
hazards on infrastructure networks.
LIFE-CYCLE COST
ASSESSMENT OF OPTIMALLY
DESIGNED REINFORCED
CONCRETE BUILDINGS
UNDER SEISMIC ACTIONS
In the framework of the present study, two multi-
story 3D RC buildings, shown in Figure 1 (a) and
(b), have been optimally designed to meet the
Eurocode (EC2 (2004) and EC8 (2004)) or the
PBD requirements. Furthermore, the two buildings
(optimally designed according to EC2 and EC8)
have been considered in order to study the influ-
ence of various factors on LCCA procedure and
to perform critical assessment of seismic design
procedures. Therefore, the investigation presented
in this study is composed by three parts. In the
first part the single and multi-objective optimiza-
tion problems are solved, in the second part the
influence of various parameters on the LCCA
procedure is quantified while in the last part a
critical assessment of the two design procedures
with reference to the life-cycle cost is presented.
Figure 1. Test cases: (a) Eight-story 3D view, (b) Five-story 3D view
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