Holistic assessment of existing buildings: Indian context

Greener buildings, condition assessment and structural damage during hazards are contemporary issues related to building performance. The increasing complexities of change of usage, deterioration with time and comfort levels have necessitated assessment of the existing building stock. In spite of ample knowledge in the field, there is often a lack of relevant data and large uncertainty is implicit in the current detailed procedures that may address only one of the issues at a time. Considering the huge existing building stock of varying typologies, vulnerability of this large population to multi-hazard scenarios and adverse environmental impacts on buildings, there is a dire need to address multi-hazard structural safety and green performance of buildings. An integrated expert opinion based model is formulated in this paper to appraise the base level performance of buildings. India specific building typologies and standards were used to frame the criteria of assessment. Data were obtained from Indian professionals in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry and academia. Fuzzy TOPSIS has been employed to decide on the weighting of each criterion and thus rank buildings based on expert opinions. This tool can have wide use for municipal corporations, building insurance companies and local governments.