Using BIM for the assessment of the seismic performance of educational buildings

The progress of the study of seismic vulnerability has allowed the formulation of new assessment methodologies, which take into account not only the behaviour of the structural and non-structural elements, but also the components that, due to their importance and cost, can represent an investment that in some cases becomes greater than the cost of the whole building. To carry out this more specific type of study, it is necessary to use tools that allow estimating, locating and properly characterizing the components, which has been a problem that has not yet been solved, due to the inability to maintain together all the components in a single model of a building. This paper presents the results of a research in which BIM procedures have been combined to overcome these deficiencies, successfully implementing it in the assessment of the seismic vulnerability of a set of university buildings which have been built in the middle of 1970's and 2000's, improving the quality of the information necessary to perform the numerical simulations and the consequent quantification of the damage that allowed obtaining the required repair costs, under the scenario of the occurrence of a maximum probable earthquake.