Articles by Fabio Fatiguso

Surveys conducted in the aftermath of recent earthquakes have shown that the structural and anti-seismic performances of historical masonry churches are related not only to structural damages and masonry quality but also to other key features such as effectiveness of connections, damages of wooden elements or criticalities related to humidity. Technical and scientific communities are interested in developing or improving existing procedures for the fast-visual survey and diagnostics in order to measure and analyze all the parameters affecting the building performance. In this paper a new procedure, that can be implemented in a Decision Support System (DSS) based on the Analytic Hierarchy Processes (AHP), is developed to perform a rapid visual survey and diagnostics of masonry building through a set of condition ratings. The originality of the presented work is fourfold: 1) the AHP allows to include in the analysis qualitative and quantitative data such as the quality of masonry and connections effectiveness; 2) the proposed survey and diagnostics performed by suitable condition ratings allow an extensive application in order to identify the most damaged buildings that require more detailed structural investigations; 3) the proposed AHP-based approach is integrated in a DSS to provide a powerful computerized tool, useful to large scale data acquisition; 4) the comparison with a standard diagnostics is performed to validate the procedure and emphasize the advantages of the novel diagnostics.

The aim of this paper is the implementation of a methodological workflow for the diagnosis of masonry settlings, within the HBIM approach, developing a rule-based logical inference tool in Visual Programming Language. The rule-based inferencing diagnosis is a guided process, which increases the confidence factor about settlings and actual causes, on the basis of surveyors’ technical insights and evidences. The final step is the suggestion of appropriate interventions. The results show that inference logic is directly applicable to the diagnosis problem; their efficacy depends on i) the structured parametric and data modelling of decay patterns in the HBIM model and ii) the knowledge base training. The application has been validated on a case study, Masseria Don Cataldo (Bari, South Italy).