Reasoning about Building Systems and Content to Support Vulnerability Assessment in Building Emergencies

Abstract

Vulnerability assessment serves to identify vulnerabilities, develop responses, and drive the risk-management process. In identifying vulnerabilities, it is fundamental to identify and rank critical assets, which include vital systems, facilities, processes, and information necessary to maintain continuity of service. During emergencies in the facility management domain, first responders typically search for critical assets, both related to business continuity and value to the organization. This paper presents a formalized approach to reason about building systems and content to support vulnerability assessment in building emergencies caused by failures in building systems (e.g., sprinkler line leak, power outage). The developed reasoning approach enables a first responder to perform flexible searches and prioritize critical spaces and pieces of equipment that need to be protected in an emergency by leveraging existing building and content representations found in building information models (BIM). This approach targets retrieving and prioritizing vulnerable content using a faceted classification-based approach. The faceted-retrieval mechanism was tested for precision and recall in retrieving vulnerable content in two scenarios with ten experts. Results show increased precision and recall (98 and 92%, respectively) when all facets were used in the search. These results demonstrate that the faceted-retrieval mechanism more effectively retrieves content that need to be protected in building emergencies.