Fuzzy based state assessment for reinforced concrete building structures

This paper presents a fuzzy based assessment system for reinforced concrete building structures which estimates the current state of buildings and presents a guide for future maintenance and management. The primary assessment categories include the state of building history, environmental conditions, structural capacity, and durability. Each category consists of a set of sub-criteria. A modular stepwise assessment facilitates efficient assessments and is able to cope with the problem of missing criteria. The assessment criteria are estimated based on visual inspection and simply measured data based on the given criteria. A Choquet fuzzy integral is used to integrate the estimated results of the criteria and their weights expressed as a Sugeno lambda-fuzzy measure. As a result of integration, the system provides a state index, which is used to determine recommended actions for future maintenance and management. When applied to the actually diagnosed buildings, the proposed system provided results similar to those obtained by experts, and we expect that this system can be used as an effective maintenance and management tool for RC building structures in regular inspection stages. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.