Foreword

Designing buildings or industrial complexes in areas prone to seismic risk requires specific competences in the fields of seismic hazard, soil dynamics and building's seismic vulnerability.   Such highly specialized knowledge however often goes beyond the usual competences of designers.  For this reason the eRiskZone Portal has been created aiming at providing to designers both hazard studies for specific sites as well as local microzonation studies carried at regional or local scale.

Two kinds of  services are offered through eRiskZone:

1) Preliminary evaluation of the potential seismic risk that characterizes buildings both existing or in design phase located in any point of the (Italian) territory.  Such evaluation is provided on-line, freely and automatically by our software that applies simplified methods for the definition of the three fundamental aspects of the seismic risk analysis which are: a) seismic hazard at the site, b) local amplification effects, c) seismic vulnerability of the structure of interest. The information provided automatically in this portal requires to the user a minimal amount of knowledge about the site location, the building characteristics and the foundation soils peculiarities.  The obtained results however are intent to give orientations only and can be of interest for designers, public administrators and civil protection executives but cannot be taken as basis for the design of new buildings or seismic retrofit actions of existing buildings as for such activities the only adequate reference should be the current seismic regulation.

2) Site specific seismic hazard studies or microzonation studies carried out at regional or local scale. Such studies, that are carried out off-line and foresee the production of a technical report both in paper and in electronic form, require the client's acceptance of a specific offer from Geodeco S.p.A.  In the case of  a study for a specific site, the results will be provided in terms of response spectrum with constants probability of exceedance, and if requested by the Client together with three or more accelerograms and the magnitude of the reference seismic event for every spectral frequency and for one ore more return periods.  In the case of seismic hazard at regional or local scale the results will be provided in terms of hazard maps, response spectra with constant probability of exceedance for a grid of points on the territory, magnitude for the reference seismic event for every point of the grid and for every spectral frequency for one or more return periods as requested by the client.  Possible clients are local public administrations (regional administration in particular) and designers of specific works.