Condition assessment of building façades based on hazard to people

Abstract

To make periodic inspections of the buildings is useful to quantify the extent to which deficiencies are severe or not, in order to facilitate decision making and prioritize interventions. In previous works by the authors is proposed a scale of gravity of damages in buildings, with the aim of being of widespread and of common use among professionals. This scale is applied through the direct assignment (DA) methodology, based on the generic definitions of each degree. It is demonstrated and characterized the existence of certain level of variability among technicians, when assigning gravity values using DA methodology, due to the fuzzy condition of the attribute to be evaluated. The main goal of this paper is to propose a methodology to assign values of gravity, based on hazard for people of detachments from the façade, by using measurable parameters and mathematical functions. The final objective is to reduce the level of variability among inspectors when assessing the condition state of a building façade. The proposed methodology is named system of evaluation of façades (SEF). The methodology can be also extended to the assessment of other building systems as structures or roofs and other type of infrastructures.

Keywords:

• Buildings
• façade
• damages
• inspections
• hazard
• scale
• direct assignment
• condition state

Acknowledgements

This research has been partially supported by grants MTM2015-64465-C2-1-R (MINECO/FEDER) from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) and 2017 SGR 622 from the Departament d’Economia i Coneixement de la Generalitat de Catalunya. Authors are grateful to the five experts that generously collaborated in the statistical essay as well to the members of the IEMAE (Institute of Statistics and Mathematics Applied to the Building Construction) of the Barcelona School of Building Construction, because of their valuable comments and suggestions in the development of the work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.