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In this section we are going to illustrate how to run the Building Decision Support analyses in MAEviz. The analyses include the Building Decision Support Attributes Analysis, the Equivalent Cost Analysis(ECA), the Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis(MAUT) and the Individual Utility Analysis. The Building Decision Support analysis computes the decision attributes such as monetary loss, injuries, deaths and function loss that can be used by the Equivalent Cost Analysis to turn the non monetary attributes into monetary attributes for making decisions. Alternatively, these attributes can be given to the Multi-Attribute Utility Analysis to compute the overall utility of the results. The Individual Utility Analysis provides the change in utility for retrofitting a single structure while leaving all other structures unchanged. This is useful for determining which building(s) give the best return for your investment.
Before going through the decision support process, there are a few things the user will need to get the most out of these analyses. For the equivalent cost analysis, the user will need conversion values for the non-monetary variables such as injuries, deaths and days of function loss or use the pre-defined values in MAEviz. For the multi attribute utility analysis and the individual utility analysis, the user will need to define utility curves for each attribute as well as determine what the weight of each attribute is in the overall utility. Example curves are available, but will not provide good results because they are not defined to work with the dataset we have and were meant only for illustration purposes.
Decision Attributes
Let's use the building dataset we already have loaded to generate some decision attributes that we can then use in the ECA and MAUT analysis. We can choose to either use the damage datasets we have already generated or generate some new datasets. For now, we'll use what we already have since we will need to obtain the as-built decision attributes to find the incremental change in utility for upgrading structures one at a time.
- First, we will need to launch the Run Analysis Wizard again. To do so, you can click the Execute Analysis toolbar button (
). Find the Decision Support category and expand it. Select Building Decision Support Attributes and click Finish.
Analyzing Results
Now that the analyses that we were interested in have been completed, it's time to analyze and try to make sense of the results. There are various ways of viewing and visualizing the results, which we will learn now.
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