Benchmarking Forensic Engineering practice — A Philosophical Discussion

Recent series of unfortunate events resulted in thousands of damaged/deteriorated structures. To validate insurance claims and rehabilitation efforts and to assist disaster-worn citizens, a significant amount of forensic engineering work is currently on-going and will continue for a long time. In the midst of these activities, a significant amount of disputes/mis-judgements will occur and will cause further difficulties in settling claims and restoring normal operations. To ensure quality of forensic work, this paper attempts to address the more fundamental issue of current forensic science and engineering practices, which adopts an inverse engineering approach whereupon knowledge is accumulated from construction design and post-event observations. The reasoning process is based on pure deduction with very little in-between causality evidence. Current approach relies heavily on an engineer's interdisciplinary expertise, training, and reasoning ability, and lacks the fundamental scientific process of elimination of possibilities. It, therefore, often fails to produce complete multidisciplinary solutions to complex forensics problems. This paper attempts to establish quality quantification by suggesting forensic benchmarking such that the involved procedures can be standardized and eliminate the "guess work" still common in an otherwise rapidly developing and highly challenging field.