Structural degradation measurement and diagnostics of historical masonry buildings

Surveys performed in the aftermath of recent earthquakes have shown that the structural and anti-seismic performances of masonry buildings are related not only to structural damages and masonry quality but also other key features such as effectiveness of connections, damages of wooden elements or criticalities related with humidity. To this aim technical and scientific communities are interested in development or improve 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 based on the Analytic Hierarchy Processes (AHP) is developed to perform a rapid visual surveys and diagnostics of masonry building through a set of condition ratings. The novelty of the presented work is threefold: i) the AHP allows to include qualitative and quantitative data in the analysis such as the quality of masonry and connections effectiveness; ii) the proposed survey and diagnostics performed by suitable condition ratings allows an extensive application in order to identify the most damaged buildings that require more detailed structural investigations; iii) a comparison with a standard diagnostics is performed to validate the procedure and emphasize the advantages of the novel diagnostics.