The Combined Use of Airborne Remote Sensing Techniques within a GIS Environment for the Seismic Vulnerability Assessment of Urban Areas: An Operational Application

The growing concern about the protection of built heritage and the sustainability of urban areas has driven the reoccupation of existing masonry buildings, which, in the great majority of the cases, were not designed or constructed to withstand significant seismic forces. This fact, associated with territorial occupation often concentrated in areas with high seismic hazard, makes it essential to look at these buildings from the point of view of the assessment of their seismic vulnerability and retrofitting needs. However, to be effective and efficient, such an assessment must be founded on a solid knowledge of the existing methods and tools, as well as on the criteria that should underlie the selection of the most appropriate to use in each context and situation. Aimed at contributing to systematise that knowledge, this paper presents a comprehensive review of the most relevant vulnerability assessment methods applicable at different scales, as well as the most significant traditional and innovative seismic retrofitting solutions for existing masonry buildings.

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A NOVEL APPROACH TO SUPPORT MAJORITY VOTING IN SPATIAL GROUP MCDM USING DENSITY INDUCED OWA OPERATOR FOR SEISMIC VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT

ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ◽

10.5194/isprsarchives-xl-2-w3-209-2014 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol XL-2/W3 ◽

pp. 209-214 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

M. Moradi ◽

M. R. Delavar ◽

B. Moshiri ◽

F. Khamespanah

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Vulnerability Assessment ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Seismic Vulnerability ◽

Main Idea ◽

Computational Method ◽

Majority Voting ◽

Multi Criteria Decision Making ◽

Human Beings ◽

Seismic Vulnerability Assessment

Being one of the most frightening disasters, earthquakes frequently cause huge damages to buildings, facilities and human beings. Although the prediction of characteristics of an earthquake seems to be impossible, its loss and damage is predictable in advance. Seismic loss estimation models tend to evaluate the extent to which the urban areas are vulnerable to earthquakes. Many factors contribute to the vulnerability of urban areas against earthquakes including age and height of buildings, the quality of the materials, the density of population and the location of flammable facilities. Therefore, seismic vulnerability assessment is a multi-criteria problem. A number of multi criteria decision making models have been proposed based on a single expert. The main objective of this paper is to propose a model which facilitates group multi criteria decision making based on the concept of majority voting. The main idea of majority voting is providing a computational tool to measure the degree to which different experts support each other’s opinions and make a decision regarding this measure. The applicability of this model is examined in Tehran metropolitan area which is located in a seismically active region. The results indicate that neglecting the experts which get lower degrees of support from others enables the decision makers to avoid the extreme strategies. Moreover, a computational method is proposed to calculate the degree of optimism in the experts’ opinions.

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