A Consensus-Based Likert–LMBP Model for Evaluating the Earthquake Resistance of Existing Buildings

Almost every year, earthquakes threaten many lives, so not only do developing countries suffer negative effects from earthquakes on their economies but also developed ones that lose significant economic resources, suffer massive fatalities, and have to suspend businesses and occupancy. Existing buildings in earthquake-prone areas need structural safety assessments or seismic vulnerability assessments. It is crucial to assess earthquake damage before an earthquake to prevent further losses, and to assess building damage after an earthquake to aid emergency responders. Many models do not take into account the surveyor’s subjectivity, which causes observational vagueness and uncertainty. Additionally, a lack of experience or knowledge, engineering errors, and inconspicuous parameters could affect the assessment. Thus, a consensus-based Likert–LMBP (the Levenberg–Marquardt backpropagation algorithm) model was developed to rapidly assess the seismic performance of buildings based on post-earthquake visual images in the devastating Kahramanmaraş earthquake, which occurred on 6 February 2023 and had magnitudes of 7.7 and 7.6 and severely affected 11 districts in Türkiye. Vulnerability variables for buildings are assessed using linguistic variables on a five-point Likert scale based on expert consensus values derived from post-earthquake visual images. The building vulnerability parameters required for the proposed model are determined as the top hill–slope effect, weak story effect, soft story effect, short column effect, plan irregularity, pounding effect, heavy overhang effect, number of stories, construction year, structural system state, and apparent building quality. Structural analyses categorized buildings as no damage, slight damage, moderate damage, or severe damage/collapse. Training the model resulted in quite good performance (mse = 7.26306 × 10−5). Based on the statistical analysis of the entire data set, the mean and the standard deviation of the errors were 0.00068 and 0.00852, respectively.