An Expert System for Reinforced Concrete Structural Damage Quantification

Objective evaluation of structural damage in buildings which have been subjected to strong ground motions is an undertaking where expert knowledge and the ability to process correlated but fuzzy information in a consistent way must be blended. Often, in the immediate aftermath of earthquakes, field data is collected by survey teams whose expertise is variable. The use of knowledge-based systems capable of reaching an unequivocal decision on the damage state of a given building on the basis of queries arranged in a consistent hierarchical order would remove human subjectivity. This paper describes the internal design of an expert system called EPEDA which is used as a tool for making a numerical ranking of damage in reinforced concrete buildings.