Abstract
Buildings are vulnerable to collapse incidents. We adopt a workflow to detect unusual vertical surface motions before building collapses based on PS-InSAR time series analysis and spatiotemporal data mining techniques. Sentinel-1 ascending and descending data are integrated to decompose vertical deformation in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Collapsed building data were collected from official sources, and overlayed on PS-InSAR vertical deformation results. Time series deformation residuals are used to create a space–time cube in the ArcGIS software environment and analyzed by emerging hot spot analysis to extract spatiotemporal patterns for vertical deformation around collapsed buildings. Our results show two spatiotemporal patterns of new cold spot or new hot spot before the incidents in 66 out of 68 collapsed buildings between May 2015 and December 2018. The method was validated in detail on four collapsed buildings between January and May 2019, proving the applicability of this workflow to create a temporal vulnerability map for building collapse monitoring. This study is a step forward to create a PS-InSAR based model for building collapse prediction in the city.
Highlights
Urban areas are often expanding into vulnerable areas and buildings become under risk of collapse due to many reasons in different parts of the world
This study was designed to understand the spatiotemporal patterns of vertical deformation surrounding a building before its collapse
From the results two patterns could be seen before collapse—new cold spot and new hot spot patterns
Summary
Urban areas are often expanding into vulnerable areas and buildings become under risk of collapse due to many reasons in different parts of the world. It is essential to monitor surface deformation in cities for abnormal motion. This helps in evacuation before the collapse, to save lives and important properties. Building movements are observed by installing equipment such as settlement extensometers into the building structures. Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are another choice to measure building deformation. Both measurements are limited to a few selected buildings and relatively expensive [1,2]
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