EFEHR is supporting working groups to revise and further develop the existing ESRM. Its tasks will be to propose an updated ESRM in 2027 through a series of revisions and improvements to the existing ESRM20, and work towards the development of a next-generation ESRM to be tentatively released in 2030.
Key aspects to be developed include:
- A more refined consideration of vulnerability, which will:
- Develop the existing ESRM20 by moving away from the previous approach of single degree of freedom oscillator (SDOF) responses, coupled with damage to loss models, to develop vulnerability models. The main development will come in the utility of multiple degree of freedom (MDOF) stick models to account for storey-by-storey damage to buildings and accurately account for both drift- and acceleration-sensitive damage.
- Use a more elaborate and refined consideration of ground motions with which to analyse the building models and quantify structural damage,
- Offer further refinement in demand estimation and loss accumulation via storey loss functions. This will allow sources of losses in building classes to be broken down by storey level, demand type, and also damageable group type.
- Employ numerical models used to create suitable taxonomy MDOFs will be based on the SimDesign framework developed as part of the Built Environment Data (BED) initiative where country-specific details on the past seismic design code temporal evolution will be considered to provide a more refined consideration of the structural vulnerability of European taxonomies.
- An update of the exposure datasets, which will:
- Improve some of the national models using datasets (e.g., housing surveys, socio-economic information, energy consumption) that have been released since 2020.
- Update of the replacement costs based on recent construction cost books and large language models (LLMs).
- Revise the building classes and related seismic design code levels based on recent literature and observations from damaging earthquakes.
- Refine the replacement costs considering the structural component, non-structural components and contents for all building classes.
- Improve the spatial resolution of the exposure models using the latest earth observation datasets and building-footprint data.
- The WG will also aim at investigating the impact of updates on the seismic hazard components that will be carried out by the hazard-related WGs.
For further information on the approaches and concepts under developments, please refer to:
Nafeh, A. M. B., Aljawhari, K., & Silva, V. (2025). An open-source toolkit for seismic vulnerability assessment. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Methods in Structural Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering (COMPDYN 2025), Rodos, Greece, 15–18 June 2025. https://doi.org/10.7712/120125.12591.25556
Ozsarac, V., Pereira, N., Mohamed, H., Romão, X. and O’Reilly, G.J. (2025), The Built Environment Data Framework for Simulated Design and Vulnerability Modelling in Earthquake Engineering. Earthquake Engng Struct Dyn., 54: 2651-2670. https://doi.org/10.1002/eqe.4378
O’Reilly, G. J. & Shahnazaryan, D. (2024). On the utility of story loss functions for regional seismic vulnerability modeling and risk assessment. Earthquake Spectra, 40(3), 1933–1955. https://doi.org/10.1177/87552930241245940