Application of the Bayesian Belief Nets in dam safety monitoring

Application of the Bayesian Belief Nets in dam safety monitoring The systems for earth dam monitoring should enable measurements of basic physical parameters describing the behavior of the structure, including: soil water pressure, soil stress, displacements, leaks, and drainage discharges. In the case of earth dam safety assessment, the monitoring data are used to detect any anomalies in dam behavior. In this paper, the dam safety has been analyzed using the Bayesian Nets. Two types of information: water pressure measurements and drainage discharge measurements are used in analyses. The seepage anomalies in the Klimkówka Dam were considered in demonstrate the practical advantages of using the Bayesian Nets for monitoring data interpretation. Presented examples of the Bayesian Nets applications (forward and backward propagation) in analysis of seepage through earth dams show that this method can be an effective tool supporting an assessment of dams technical condition and monitoring of the dam safety.

Estimating the Statistical Distribution of Human Damage Produced by a Fire in a Building Using Bayesian Belief Nets

The complexity of the cities’ layout and other public spaces, together with the large number of people involved leads to increased strain on the resources of emergency responders. An accident, such as a fire, remains a rare event so it is difficult for those in charge of preparing for an emergency and deciding on the acceptability of risk to get a picture of such an event. The interest of all emergency response agencies is to minimize the impact of disaster events on the entities of interest, which include first of all the human population. For this, there is need for a tool that helps the decision makers estimate the distribution of the fire outcome, given different information about the environment in which the fire takes place. This paper discusses the possibility of using continuous Bayesian belief nets for the study of the factors that influence the risk to which the people involved in a building fire are exposed, and how these factors influence the risk. The big advantage of Bayesian belief net approach is that it can model uncertain events. The distribution of the variables of interest can be easily updated given information about some of the other variables. Moreover, the intuitive visual representation of the problem at hand can help people to understand complex systems or processes, like a fire in a building. In this study, the approach is tested for a small example and the results are analyzed. The possibility of extending this method to a more complex model is discussed.