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:

  1. 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.

  2. Processors: Code that analyzes image sets to extract relevant information from each image.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Inferers: Code that infers new asset fields from existing information in an AssetInventory using empirically derived rulesets.

Shared Data Types

These classes interact through their interfaces and by passing shared data types, which include:

  1. AssetInventory: Represents the collection of assets and their attributes.

  2. ImageSet: Represents a collection of images used in processing or filtering.

  3. RegionBoundary: Represents the spatial boundaries of the area being analyzed.

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.