Critical comparison of seismic vulnerability models considering macroseismic intensity

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The procedure to assess seismic risk and estimate insured and uninsured losses is well established. It mainly consists of combining two major components: the estimated seismic hazard and the developed vulnerability models. This proposal is focused on the seismic vulnerability models that define the damage level for a given ground motion measure. The development of such a model is simple if there are sufficient well documented experimental full scale "test" results. However, this is typically not the case, and often the assigned vulnerability models for buildings of different types and geometries can only be developed based on opinion of experts or inferred from rare historical earthquake damage surveys in turn related to macroseismic intensity (such as Modified Mercalli Intensity or MMI). The difficulty is compounded by that no single construction practice norm is universally implemented, and different government agencies, insurance industry players, and/or research groups prefer different vulnerability models. However, important quantifications of the differences among the available vulnerability models are not available or accessible.