This paper addresses the potential relationship between future NEHRP Provisions and resilience-based earthquake design, especially in the context of definitions and priorities established in federal law by the 2018 NEHRP reauthorization. It extends concepts proposed in Resource Paper 1 in Part 3 of the 2015 Provisions. Federal policy now calls for increasing earthquake resilience at the community scale and identifies building codes and standards as tools for doing so. Resilience relies on the timely recovery of the built environment.
Building codes and standards can therefore serve a resilience goal, at any scale, by providing design criteria based on functional recovery time. The current code-and-standard model is adaptable to resilience-based design, with the standard providing technical definitions and design criteria, and the code setting policy goals. The NEHRP Provisions can support resilience-based design by providing source material for a functional recovery standard. Specific design strategies and criteria would be required for different functional recovery times, much in the same way that the current Provisions set specific criteria for different seismic design categories. While many questions remain to be answered through research, the current Provisions suggest a set of requirements that might be used in the short term.
