1 TOWARDS REAL-TIME SEISMIC RISK MITIGATION FOR CRITICAL FACILITIES: LESSONS LEARNED FROM CASE STUDIES IN REAKT Carlo CAUZZI 1 , Paolo GASPARINI 2 , Antonio EMOLO 3 , Mustafa ERDIK 4 , Iunio IERVOLINO 5 , Carlo LAI 6 , Kyriazis PITILAKIS 7 , Erdal ŞAFAK 8 , Efthimios SOKOS 9 , Carlos SOUSA OLIVEIRA 10 , Kristín VOGFJÖRD 11 , Stefan WIEMER 12 , Aldo ZOLLO 13 , Jochen ZSCHAU 14 , Sotiria KARAPETROU 15 , Dino BINDI 16 and Can ZÜLFIKAR 17 Work package 7 (WP7, Strategic Applications and Capacity Building) of the EC-funded project REAKT (Strategies and Tools for Real Time EArthquake RisK ReducTion, FP7, www.reaktproject.eu, contract no. 282862) is devoted to the development of feasibility studies and, in some cases, implementation efforts of real-time earthquake risk mitigation methods to strategic test sites. Methods include operational earthquake forecasting (OEF, investigated in WP3), earthquake early warning (EEW, dealt with in WP4), and real-time structural health monitoring (SHM, the subject of WP5). Implementation takes advantage of optimised decision-making strategies developed in WP6. WP7 represents therefore a key element of the whole research project, as the strategic applications provide the opportunity to implement and test scientific and technical products achieved by the different research units, and to develop a better understanding of what the end-users expect by applying EEW, SHM and OEF to reduce earthquake related risk at the selected test sites. This is achieved through close cooperation between academic researcher and end-users since the beginning of the project and constitutes one of the most innovative aspects of REAKT. Several strategic applications have been selected, as listed in Table 1 (see also Cua et al., 2012). The application / end- user group includes civil protection authorities, railways, hospitals, schools, industrial complexes, nuclear plants, lifeline systems, national seismic networks, and critical structures. The scale of target applications encompasses a wide range, from two high-school complexes in Naples, to individual critical structures, such as the bridge connecting Rion and Antirion nearby Patras, and the Fatih Sultan 1 Swiss Seismological Service (SED) at ETHZ, Zurich (Switzerland), carlo.cauzzi@sed.ethz.ch 2 Analysis and Monitoring of Environmental Risk (AMRA), Naples (Italy), paolo.gasparini@amracenter.com 3 University Federico II, Naples (Italy), antonio.emolo@unina.it 4 Bogazici Univ., Kandilli Observatory and Earth. Research Institute, Istanbul (Turkey), erdik@boun.edu.tr 5 University Federico II, Naples (Italy), iunio.iervolino@unina.it 6 EUCENTRE, Pavia (Italy), carlo.lai@eucentre.it 7 Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece), kpitilak@civil.auth.gr 8 Bogazici Univ., Kandilli Observatory and Earth. Research Institute, Istanbul (Turkey), erdal.safak@boun.edu.tr 9 University of Patras, Patras (Greece), esokos@upatras.gr 10 Technical University (IST), Lisbon (Portugal), csoliv@civil.ist.utl.pt 11 Icelandic Meteorological Office, Reykjavik (Iceland), vogfjord@vedur.is 12 Swiss Seismological Service (SED) at ETHZ, Zurich (Switzerland), stefan.wiemer@sed.ethz.ch 13 University Federico II, Naples (Italy), aldo.zollo@unina.it 14 University of Potsdam, Potsdam (Germany), zschau@gfz-potsdam.de 15 Aristotle University, Thessaloniki (Greece), gkarapet@civil.auth.gr 16 GFZ Helmholtz-Zentrum, Potsdam (Germany), bindi@gfz-potsdam.de 17 Bogazici Univ., Kandilli Observatory and Earth. Res. Institute, Istanbul (Turkey), can.zulfikar@boun.edu.tr