A Vector Scale of Severity of Damages in Buildings

Abstract

In the context of the existing buildings, along the recent years the concept of maintenance has changed from corrective maintenance to preventive maintenance, which is based in part on periodic inspections. There is ample evidence that preventive maintenance is more efficient than corrective maintenance, since severe deteriorations that may represent danger to people are avoided, and also money is saved. To make periodic inspections of the buildings is useful to quantify the extent to which deficiencies are severe or not, in order to facilitate decision making and prioritize therapeutic interventions. To this purpose many scales have been used and are used to assess the degree of gravity of the damages in constructive elements. But it is important to say that there is no common consensus and these scales are different between them according to the study to which they belong. Thus, the main goal of this article is to propose a methodology for calculating the degree of severity of damages in buildings, which is of widespread use. This calculation method, which is in distribution and in scalar, lets to calculate the severity index of systems and of the entire building, and it is easy to use and flexible. © The authors.