Implementation of the damage index approach for the rapid evaluation of earthquake resistant buildings

This paper presents a promising approach to modeling the building resistance in the seismic rehabilitation process. The damage index model (DIM) can be interactively utilized into the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in order to compute parameters and to analyze data for a quality management purpose. It can perform an easy accessibility of the data to evaluate buildings for earthquake mitigation and preparedness. This research article intended to introduce a software program by using an integration system to design and to dissect the data for evaluating a building resistance against earthquakes. This paper promises a new integrated system for rapid evaluation of buildings, further a city planning by combination of GIS, civil engineering and industrial engineering upon the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) accompanied by seismic data, structure, parcel, material type, foundation, ceiling, wall, floor, the interior and the exterior. This software has been programmed based on the Damage Index (DI) algorithm that was developed by Pirasteh et al. (Int J Geoinformatics 5(4): 34–41, 2009). Later, based on the proposed algorithm or model the essential parameters have been adopted in Matrix laboratory (MATLAB) environment to yield a new software program for the meliorating earthquake mitigation and preparedness processes. This software program can identify vulnerability of the buildings ranking from 1 to 100. In addition, this paper recommends establishing a scientific procedure in determining the vulnerability of the buildings for earthquake preparedness within a GIS environment. However, this software program can amend in detecting weak structures for rehabilitation.