Rapid post-earthquake assessment of bridge damage through 3D BIM reconstruction

Summary: In the aftermath of major earthquakes, rapidly capturing and quantifying the extent and severity of damage on buildings and critical infrastructure plays an important role in post-earthquake operations such as search and rescue, emergency repairs and long-term reconstruction. Current damage assessment practices, however, are labour intensive, time consuming and subject to errors, which also raise safety concerns for those engineers undertaking the inspections. To overcome this challenge, this project aims to develop a rapid, automated and data-driven method for post-earthquake bridge inspection by using Building Information Modelling (BIM) and 3D reconstruction. New algorithms are developed to reconstruct and analyse as-damaged bridge BIM to identify bridges’ damage grade and support decision making. To support further analysis, an Information Interpretation Engine (IIE) is developed to transform as-damaged BIM data to engineering analysis applications. Success of this project will not only add fundamental knowledge to post-earthquake damage assessment but significantly improve current engineering practice in New Zealand and worldwide.

Funder: University of Auckland Faculty Research Development Fund (FRDF): New Staff Grant

Team: Yang Zou (PI), Vicente Gonzalez (University of Auckland), James Lim (University of Auckland)

Duration: 2019-2022