Holistic Value-at-Risk Assessment Framework for Fire Risk Assessment of Heritage Buildings Based on Analytic Hierarchy Process and Text Mining
Publication: ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 9, Issue 1
Abstract
Value-at-risk (VAR) is an indispensable part of a disaster risk assessment of historical buildings. Indicator-based value framework can provide a consistent and comparative method to assess the VAR of historical buildings. However, the existing value frameworks and their indicators are diverse, greatly due to the multidimensional characteristic of the value of historical buildings. Besides, there are various value indicators that existing frameworks do not encompass. As such, a holistic framework to assess the VAR of historical buildings is still needed. Establishing a holistic VAR framework requires a detailed review of existing value frameworks and indicators to understand their similarities and differences. Therefore, a review of existing value frameworks and indicators is presented, covering frameworks and indicators applicable to three categories of built cultural heritage (historical buildings, monuments, and archaeological sites) reported in literature, as well as guidelines and reports. The review summarizes 53 value indicators and 12 frameworks, and after integration, reorganization, and optimization, a novel holistic VAR framework, with 6 first-level indicators and 42 second-level indicators, has been proposed for VAR assessment of historical buildings using the analytic hierarchy process based on expert elicitation. Further, the proposed VAR framework has been verified by performing a text mining analysis of the definitions/descriptions of the value indicators. Two historical buildings in China were analyzed to demonstrate the universality and comprehensiveness of the proposed VAR framework. The VAR assessment results can provide reference on safety measures allocation for risk reduction of historical buildings.
Practical Applications
Historical buildings are vulnerable to disasters such as fires. Thus, a disaster risk assessment is of practical significance for safety measure allocation and risk reduction of historical buildings. When performing a disaster risk assessment of historical buildings, a VAR assessment is an indispensable part. At present, the VAR of modern buildings is normally solely determined in monetary terms; however, historical buildings have multidimensional values that are difficult, even impossible, to quantify, and there is currently no practical approach to assess the VAR. An indicator-based VAR assessment framework can provide a consistent and comparative way to assess the VAR of historical buildings. By using the proposed VAR assessment framework, the multidimensional value indicators of historical buildings can be assessed relatively. This relative VAR assessment method allows a consistent and well-regulated assessment of the VARs of different historical buildings and horizontal comparison among the VARs. The VAR assessment results can be incorporated into disaster risk assessment to provide guidance on safety measures allocation for risk reduction of historical buildings.
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Data Availability Statement
The data used in the present study include text data of value definitions/descriptions and expert score data. The text data of value definitions/descriptions are listed in Appendix with references, and the expert score data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the National Key Research & Development (R&D) Plan of China under Grant No. 2020YFC1522800.
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ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
Volume 9 • Issue 1 • March 2023
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© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jul 5, 2022
Accepted: Sep 15, 2022
Published online: Nov 23, 2022
Published in print: Mar 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Apr 23, 2023
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