An Analytical Safety Tree for Heritage Buildings: Application to the Archaeological Museum “Domenico Ridola”, Matera (Italy)

Historical masonry construction is a significant architectural typology that represents the cultural identity of Western Europe. Exposure to seismic events seriously compromises the conservation of architectural heritage, as evidenced by recent earthquakes. In this context, the process of knowledge acquisition, vulnerability evaluation, and planning interventions becomes fundamentally important to identify and implement maintenance and conservation strategies. Safety trees, never used for seismic engineering purposes, are particularly effective in making safety-related decisions in potentially hazardous or complex situations. This paper proposes an analytical framework to evaluate the structural safety of cultural heritage buildings, using an analytical safety tree. This instrument is here applied to assist safety assessments, risk management, and process optimization. Specifically, the proposed tree encompasses a multi-step procedure characterized by three possible vulnerability assessments, with the advantage of providing an overview of the knowledge state, detected pathologies, and analysis of a heritage building, outlining a path to follow to ensure the safety of built heritage. The work first formalizes this new tool, starting from the classical theory of safety decision trees. Secondly, to demonstrate the potential of the approach, the decision tree is developed and applied to the safety assessment of the Archaeological Museum “Domenico Ridola” in Matera, Italy.