6. Conclusions
When dealing with post-earthquake damage, the assessment of buildings’ damage is a delicate task. Damaged buildings must be evaluated quickly and rigorously. After major earthquakes, inspectors face always difficulties to assess damaged buildings and to derive accurate global damage levels and non-expert inspectors are often involved which can lead to misclassification of real damage level. To overcome these weaknesses, expert systems are used to help inspectors during the assessment tasks. The present paper presented an automatic processing methodology to help inspectors during the assessment of post-earthquake damage. The proposed methodology estimates the global damage level of the buildings by considering even imprecise, uncertain or incomplete information. It relies on the damage levels observed on each of the “Structural components” (columns, beams, walls, slabs, etc.) and the “Non-structural components” (staircases, separation walls, facade, balconies, etc.).
The proposed methodology is based on fuzzy logic and relevant weighted fuzzy rules so that it minimizes the number of fuzzy rules which simplifies the development of fuzzy systems. The fuzzy rule weight represents the strength of the rule and expresses the relationships between the components’ damage and the global damage level.