The progress of the study of seismic vulnerability has allowed the formulation of new assessment methodologies, which take into account not only the behaviour of the structural and non-structural elements, but also the components that, due to their importance and cost, can represent an investment that in some cases becomes greater than the cost of the whole building. To carry out this more specific type of study, it is necessary to use tools that allow estimating, locating and properly characterizing the components, which has been a problem that has not yet been solved, due to the inability to maintain together all the components in a single model of a building. This paper presents the results of a research in which BIM procedures have been combined to overcome these deficiencies, successfully implementing it in the assessment of the seismic vulnerability of a set of university buildings which have been built in the middle of 1970's and 2000's, improving the quality of the information necessary to perform the numerical simulations and the consequent quantification of the damage that allowed obtaining the required repair costs, under the scenario of the occurrence of a maximum probable earthquake.

Currently, most of methodologies available to evaluate the seismic performance of buildings use as index maximum interstory drifts. However, recent earthquakes have evidenced the need to develop performance levels that incorporate seismic resilience concepts to evaluate the level of post-seismic functionality of buildings and their capacity to recover functionality. Furthermore, such performance levels should explicitly consider the performance of structural, non-structural elements and contents. For this purpose, this paper proposes a set of six performance limit states for office-type buildings, in which the seismic performance of structural, non-structural elements and contents is explicitly considered. Each of these limit states is associated with a set of probable events that generically determine its recovery of functionality (e.g., post-seismic inspection and management of financial resources). To exemplify the proposed scheme a seven-story reinforced concrete building with unreinforced infill masonry walls and located in Mexico City is evaluated. The results obtained suggest that the building has a significant probability of experiencing loss of functionality due to the damage suffered mainly by the non-structural elements and contents. This indicates that modern seismic design codes, as that used for this study, accomplish their main objective, which is to reduce the probability of collapse and to prevent the loss of human lives. However, these results also demonstrate that the main objective of decision makers when designing such buildings, which is to be functional for one or several needs, is not achieved.