| Abstract: | Structural damage assessment is a process that involves decision-making under uncertainty. Reasoning with or about uncertainty has been the focus of research in many fields in addition to civil engineering, such as decision analysis, philosophy, statistics and psychology. Several methods for the representation of reasoning under uncertainty have been developed. These methods, which the artificial intelligence community refers to as uncertain inference schemes, will be briefly discussed in this paper. One particular scheme, the causal network approach, will be examined in detail. Its application to post-earthquake damage assessment will be given. This particular application represents an approach that has not been used in the structural engineering field before. |
