Towards a practical loss‐based design approach and procedure

Performance-based design was first envisaged in the early 1990s and has become a mantra in conceptual seismic design. However, practical approaches to be possibly introduced in building codes are not readily available, to say the least, though some can be found in the literature. What is essentially missing is some correlation between structural response parameters and expected monetary losses, at a level of simplicity comparable with the force- or displacement-based approaches applied to design in everyday practice. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide the basics of a formulation that may evolve into such a practical loss-based approach.