Vulnerability assessment tools: forecasting and artificial intelligence

Abstract

Vulnerability assessment is a very useful tool to identify, evaluate and prioritize the restoration of cultural heritage and the budgets of the monuments from a city or inside a region and to forecast the preventive conservation policies. The degradation of monuments could be due to the effects caused by structural damages, weathering affection, pollution agents, anthropogenic factors,... The conservation degree of each monument is the vulnerability, and its index is an indirect function of the level of deterioration. RIVUPH and ART-RISK are Spanish projects based on the analysis of environmental risk in historical cities and models to assess vulnerability. With this purpose risk and hazard maps of different towns are being built with GIS (geographic information system) software. Each hazard has a given frequency and intensity in the historical cities according to their environmental conditions, these conditions change and depend on the location and the vulnerability of the monuments, for this reason GIS software and vulnerability models need to be developed in order to make decisions in historical cities. The vulnerability analysis of three churches from Seville (Spain), have been studied to assess the monuments conservation degree. There are different approaches based on the variable studied (earthquakes, floods, fires,...), but it is necessary new methodologies that allow comparing and overlapping different scenarios. The monuments have been studied by a Delphi analysis and an artificial intelligence tool based on risk and vulnerability, these methodologies allow deciding the necessity of rehabilitation or preventive conservation.