A Copula-based framework for seismic resilience assessment of civil engineering structural systems

Accurate seismic resilience assessment is critical for engineering structure design and risk management. Traditional seismic resilience assessment methods widely adopt simplified bounding assumptions for the dependencies between component failure events, most commonly presuming either complete correlation or full uncorrelation of component failures. These over-simplifications inevitably introduce substantial systematic bias, leading to pronounced overestimation or underestimation of the actual seismic performance and resilience of structural systems. To address this, this paper proposes a system-level analytical framework using Copula functions to model complex dependencies between component failure events.•The proposed method delivers a more accurate, high-probability resilience estimate within traditional theoretical bounds.•It quantifies true system resilience by capturing correlation structures overlooked by conventional methods.•This framework provides a reliable basis for performance-based seismic design and risk decision-making.