About
The Building Regional Asset Inventories for Large Scale Simulation (BRAILS++) is an object-oriented framework for creating applications that focus on generating asset inventories for large geographic regions. The framework was developed by NHERI SimCenter for the creation of asset inventories needed to understand the effects of natural hazards on the built environment.
Overview of High-Level Classes
As an object-oriented framework, BRAILS++ provides a set of high-level classes, each with well-defined interfaces that allow them to work together seamlessly in a workflow. The primary classes are:
Scrapers: Code that retrieves data from external sources. For example, a scraper might access the NSI database to gather information on buildings in a given region.
Processors: Code that analyzes image sets to extract relevant information from each image.
Filters: Code that modifies image sets by filtering out irrelevant imagery. For example, a filter might isolate only the building of interest in an image.
Imputers: Code that fills in missing information in an
AssetInventory
. Given an inventory with incomplete fields, imputers generate multiple possible values, creating what are called possible worlds.Inferers: Code that infers new asset fields from existing information in an
AssetInventory
using empirically derived rulesets.
Documentation
The BRAILS++ documentation includes examples demonstrating practical workflows as well as API documentation generated with sphinx-apidoc.
Note
Some of the code in BRAILS++ originates from the original BRAILS work. The original code has been refactored to adopt a more object-oriented design and extended with additional features.