Risk assessment of Italian school buildings at national scale: the MARS project experience

Strategic buildings, like schools, cover an essential role both in the emergency management and recovery phase after an earthquake, besides to be essential for the life of communities. A reliable risk assessment constitutes a powerful tool to address effective mitigation actions. However, while a significant amount of work was done in literature to develop risk studies and fragility curves for the residential building stock, only few contributions were clearly addressed to the risk assessment on portfolio of schools or other strategic buildings. The paper presents the effort made in the 2019-2021 MARS (Seismic Risk MAps) project - funded by the Italian Civil Protection Department and ReLUIS consortium - to fill this gap with reference to the Italian school buildings. More specifically, seven research units conveyed their expertise for developing the consensus-based “School-MARS model” by integrating fragility curves based on different approaches (i.e. empirical, analytical and hybrid) and customized on archetypes and buildings stock representative of Italian school buildings. The paper presents an overview on the main achieved results and the methodology adopted to face this challenge.