A Decision Support System for the Condition Assessment of Distressed Concrete Buildings

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Abstract
Concrete is one of the most versatile and durable construction material used worldwide. During its service life, concrete undergoes several deteriorations. The most prominent sign of deterioration is cracking. Cracks in structural concrete are similar to hieroglyphics i.e. pictures which can communicate the damage. Since a considerable expertise is required to understand the pattern of cracking and failure, the tasks of diagnosing concrete deterioration are carried out by professional specialist. It’s noteworthy that human expertise in this field is quite limited and expensive, which can lead to the investigation by inexperienced engineers and ultimately expensive misconceptions. Hence, there is a need to develop a user interface using engineering computation to support the visual examiner in decision making. This paper discusses a new support system named as ConASCon-16 developed by the authors for assessing concrete deterioration. The system uses fault trees as its rule. The interface has three modules namely REVIEW, SEEN and HIDDEN. The first module is a database on concrete deterioration, visual inspection and non-destructive testing (NDT) with appropriate photos to help the user/engineer understand, the second and third module specifies the cause of visible deteriorations and unseen distresses in concrete and predicts the condition of the structure by a simple questionnaire. A hypothetical case study has been described to demonstrate the applicability of ConASCon-16.