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Seismic vulnerability assessment of buildings is a process of paramount importance 

for  identifying  those  areas  in  a  city  demanding  higher  attention  with  respect  to  potential 

earthquake  attacks.  Methods  for  evaluating  seismic  vulnerability  require  a  more  or  less 

accurate  survey  of  the  buildings  geometrical  and  mechanical  features,  as  well  as  of  the 

structural systems, in order to identify the vulnerability classes to which they belong. However, 

even for relatively small-sized cities, the task of deriving vulnerability maps may be truly time 

consuming. Therefore, the development of automatic tools for mapping vulnerabilities of urban 

areas is necessary to reduce this effort significantly. 

QGIS (www.qgis.org) is a free open source software which includes a large number of peculiar 

packages,  that  make  it  a  powerful  tool  and  that  can  be  well  integrated  or  adapted  with  new components or plugins. In this paper, a plugin for assisting in the generation of vulnerability 

maps of an urban area is shown. The presented QGIS tool is applied to a case study, the historic 

city  centre  of  Popoli,  in  the  Abruzzi  region  (Central  Italy),  which  belongs  to  a  relevant 

earthquake-prone area and that was affected by two major seismic sequences in 2009 and in 

2016-2017. Potential damage scenarios are presented and discussed, deriving useful 

information that could be applied in risk mitigation strategies.

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== Full document ==

<pdf>Media:Draft_Content_206171738p876.pdf</pdf>

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