China Safety Science Journal ›› 2025, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (9): 193-201.doi: 10.16265/j.cnki.issn1003-3033.2025.09.1527

• Safety engineering technology • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Decision-support model for safety evaluation of existing civil buildings and its application

DAI Mengfan1(), LI Lingzhi1,**(), QIAN Yuxin2, YUAN Jingfeng3, HAN Xiaojian1, ZHAO Changhao1   

  1. 1 College of Civil Engineering, Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing Jiangsu 211816, China
    2 School of Computer Science and Technology (School of Artificial Intelligence), Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing Jiangsu 211816, China
    3 School of Civil Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing Jiangsu 211189, China
  • Received:2025-04-08 Revised:2025-06-30 Online:2025-09-28 Published:2026-03-28
  • Contact: LI Lingzhi

Abstract:

To improve the efficiency of safety inspections for existing civil buildings, this study develops a decision-support model for safety evaluation of existing civil buildings based on ML techniques. Building safety feature data were first collected from building evaluation reports. Then, a multi-dimensional indicator system integrating "design-evolution-status" features was established through correlation analysis and recursive feature elimination with cross-validation. Subsequently, five ML models were built and evaluated using performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, and recall. Furthermore, a decision-support platform for safety evaluation of existing civil buildings was developed and validated through a real engineering project to examine its practical operability. The results demonstrate that, compared to design features, evolution and status features more effectively reflect the actual safety conditions of civil buildings. In particular, building age, renovation or extension history, and concrete beam load capacity are identified as key features. Among the tested models, the Decision Tree algorithm shows the best performance in evaluating the safety of enclosure system, superstructure, foundation, and individual evaluation unit.

Key words: machine learning (ML), existing civil buildings, safety evaluation, decision-support model, indicator system

CLC Number: