Mapping the structural frame of a damaged reinforced concrete building using as-damaged scans and as-built BIM

After an earthquake, Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) can capture point clouds of the
damaged state of building facades rapidly, remotely and accurately. A long-term research
effort aims to develop applications that can reconstruct ‘as-damaged’ BIM models of
reinforced concrete (RC) framed buildings based on ‘as-built’ BIMs and scans of ‘asdamaged’
states. This paper focuses on a crucial step: generating an initial ‘best-guess’ for
the new locations of the façade structural elements. The result serves as the seed for a
recursive process in which the location and damage to each object is refined in turn.
Mapping the ‘as-built’ BIM frame into the ‘as-damaged’ scan is challenging because each
element may have different displacement and damage. The algorithm exploits the topology
of RC frames to perform initial mapping of the structural grid onto the damaged facade. The
approach was tested on a synthetic dataset prepared from a real earthquake-damaged
building. Although successful, it has yet to be tested on other damaged buildings.