THESIS ABSTRACT

Abstract

The postfire rehabilitation decisions of firedamaged buildings affected by the fire incident cannot be relied only on visual damage assessment, single professional judgment or cost considerations. These considerations may lead to inconsistent prioritization and ineffective allocation of resources. Therefore, this study aims to develop an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based decisionmaking framework for prioritizing postfire rehabilitation interventions alternatives in firedamaged RCC buildings. The study mainly used a mixedmethod approach that included a literature review, expert consultation, content validation, AHPbased pairwise comparison and Building performance weightage score. During the study, a fourlevel AHP hierarchy was created which contains the goal, main criteria, subcriteria and rehabilitation intervention alternatives. The AHP results shows that Safety, Quality & Performance and Procurement & Contract management are the top three main criteria. At the subcriterion level the highest global priorities were Risk to Occupants, Structural Stability, Residual Concrete Strength comes as three highest rank sub-criteria’s. These findings indicate that postfire rehabilitation decisions should be guided by Safety, Quality & Performance criterion while also equally taking into account for Procurement & Contract Management. The consistency analysis showed that expert judgment was acceptable. The maincriterion consistency ratio was 0.0068 and subcriterion consistency ratios ranged from 0.0065 to 0.0595 all within the accepted AHP threshold. The study further suggested the decision framework based on the AHP criteria and sub- criteria weightage for post fire rehabilitation internation. The verification for the proposed framework has been performed with expert consultation involved in minister quarter detail post fire damage assessment. The weightage score result obtained from the framework suggested that among the 10 fire- affected buildings, most of the building requires repair/restoration only followed by repair with strengthening. The frameworks are useful on decision criteria for proposed alternative based on the performance score for each criterion and sub- criteria validated from AHP model.

Keywords

Post-fire rehabilitation, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA), Rehabilitation Prioritization, Content Validity Index (CVI) Detail Damage Assessment.