Structural damage assessment criteria for reinforced concrete buildings by using a Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy process

Abstract

Reinforced concrete structures are often exposed to many types of damages and deteriorations due to different causes and exposure conditions during their life cycle. Assessment of such structures is inherently subjected to uncertainty and ambiguity, where subjective opinion and incomplete numeric data are unavoidable. In the damage assessment process, estimating the importance of assessment criteria is an important field in itself, and depends heavily on the experience and expertise of experts. The aim of this study is to present a fuzzy-based assessment model, which estimates the importance of structural assessment criteria for concrete buildings. The work aims also at studying, identifying, and prioritizing assessment criteria. These assessment criteria are based on close visual inspections and simple measurements that do not require special testing or long-term investigation. The main assessment criteria include the state of building history, environmental conditions, structural capacity, durability, and professional involvement in construction. Each of them has two levels of sub-criteria. The criteria weights are obtained based on the opinions of experts using the Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method. The application of the FAHP method showed that the most important criteria is the structural capacity with a weighting factor of 50.1%, followed by the environmental condition as second, with a weighting factor of 22.5%.