Affiliations: [a] Department of GIS, School of Surveying and Geospatial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
| [b] Center of Excellence in Geomatics Engineering in Disaster Management, School of Surveying and Geospatial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran
| [c] Seismology Research Center, International Institute of Earthquake Engineering and Seismology (IIEES), Tehran, Iran
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author. Mahmoud Reza Delavar, Center of Excellence in Geomatics Engineering in Disaster Management, School of Surveying and Geospatial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. Tel.: +98 21 88334430; Fax: +98 21 88008837; E-mail: mdelavar@ut.ac.ir.
Abstract: Seismic vulnerability assessment is a critical topic in disaster management. It is a complex uncertain spatial decision making problem due to lack of complete data, vagueness of experts’ comments in addition to uncertainties in the numerical data/relations. This paper presents a new Geospatial Information System (GIS)-based multi-criterion decision-making (MCDM) method developed for predicting building damages prior to the occurrence of a potential earthquake scenario which considers different sources of uncertainty to make realistic assessments. The developed method suggests an approximate reasoning approach through using Fuzzy Sets theory (FST) and enhanced Dempster-Shafer theory (DST). FST handles the vagueness of the heuristic knowledge on ‘importance weights of the selected criteria’ and ‘the relationship of the criteria with physical seismic vulnerability (PSV)’. The enhanced DST is used for fusion of the information by taking into account the reliability of the adopted criteria. The proposed method’s applicability is tested on existing buildings of a municipality district of Tabriz, a historical and earthquake prone city in Iran. The implementation results confirm that the proposed method is a pragmatic, rational and simple model which reduces uncertainties of PSVA to provide realistic predictions essential for assisting planners and administrators with reducing future earthquake losses in urban areas.
Keywords: Seismic vulnerability assessment, uncertainty, fuzzy sets, Dempster-Shafer
theory of evidence, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM)
