LOG-IDEAH: LOGic trees for identification of damage due to earthquakes for architectural heritage.

Abstract

In the framework of PERPETUATE, LOG-IDEAH: “LOGic trees for Identification of Damage due to Earthquakes for Architectural Heritage” has been developed as a post-earthquake assessment tool for the evaluation of the global seismic performance of architectural assets (AAs). LOG-IDEAH is an expert system which interprets the seismic damage collected on site by relying on the knowledge of engineers and architects in seismic vulnerability assessment. The present expert system has been set up on logic trees, implemented in answer set programming to encode the recognition process that surveyors proceed to investigate the causes of damage and to evaluate the failures occurring on an AA. LOG-IDEAH, available at (http://perpetuate.cs.bath.ac.uk/), allows sketching AAs, recording the state of damage, uploading GPS referenced images and comparing collapse mechanisms observed on site with collapse mechanisms identified by the system. The seismic damage, which is the minimum data required by LOG-IDEAH, is collected at the level of both structural elements and artistic assets (local level) and interpreted at the level of the AA (global level). The answer set programming applied for the construction of the machine-processable representation, once the input data has been recorded into the web-interface, provides all possible failure modes and related possibilities of occurrence by taking into consideration the reliability level of the collected data. Its capability has been validated by applying LOG-IDEAH to the historic centre of L’Aquila of the 2009 earthquake by pointing out that answer set programming is a valid alternative approach to the existing methods developed to identify the seismic performance of masonry AAs