Improving recovery time consequence models in regional seismic risk assessment by leveraging high-fidelity building-specific recovery simulations

Current regional seismic risk modeling approaches predominantly emphasize direct financial loss as the primary measure of earthquake impact. Integrating recovery time into these models can better support decisions toward community resilience and a shift toward more people-centered and equitable disaster risk modeling. Although advanced probabilistic models for estimating recovery times of individual buildings are becoming more common, regional-scale quantification for community-level simulations remains overly simplified, often relying on low-fidelity approaches without the explicit consideration of key underlying drivers of recovery. This study proposes a methodological approach to improve recovery time consequence models in regional simulations by leveraging high-fidelity, building-specific recovery simulations. We employ downtime fragility functions and consequence models to characterize key elements of the recovery process, such as impeding factor delays and repair times. This approach provides a probabilistic estimation of post-earthquake recovery time to achieve two distinct recovery states, that is, shelter-in-place and functional recovery. The proposed methodology enables a more efficient quantification of recovery time at the building portfolio scale by leveraging simulation-based recovery time consequence models that could be seamlessly integrated into regional risk assessments. The proposed consequence models are trained based on 50,000 TREADS (Tool for Recovery Estimation And Downtime Simulation) recovery simulation results of modern high-rise (8–24 stories) reinforced concrete shear wall buildings at various ground-shaking intensity levels and applied, for illustrative purposes, to a portfolio of 218 buildings across Metro Vancouver, BC, under a magnitude-9 Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.