Towards rapid and automated vulnerability classification of concrete buildings

With the overwhelming number of older reinforced concrete buildings that need to be assessed for seismic vulnerability in a city, local governments face the question of how to assess their building inventory. By leveraging engineering drawings that are stored in a digital format, a well-established method for classification reinforced concrete buildings with respect to seismic vulnerability, and machine learning techniques, we have developed a technique to automatically extract quantitative information from the drawings to classify vulnerability. Using this technique, stakeholders will be able to rapidly classify buildings according to their seismic vulnerability and have access to information they need to prioritize a large building inventory. The approach has the potential to have significant impact on our ability to rapidly make decisions related to retrofit and improvements in our communities. In the Los Angeles County alone it is estimated that several thousand buildings of this type exist. The Hassan index is adopted here as the method for automation due to its simple application during the classification of the vulnerable reinforced concrete buildings. This paper will present the technique used for automating information extraction to compute the Hassan index for a large building inventory.