The high social, economic, and environmental impacts associated with events such as the 2011 Tohoku, Japan earthquake and tsunami, and 2012 Hurricane Sandy are unsustainable. To increase community resilience against such extreme events, building engineers and architects must select designs that will perform satisfactorily under any and all hazard scenarios that may occur during a building's lifetime. Designers of resilient and sustainable buildings must therefore balance multiple competing interests. They must minimize both initial construction impacts and reconstruction impacts associated with unknown future extreme events. They must make tradeoffs between designs that optimize for one hazard to the detriment of performance under a different hazard. Finally, they must account for interdependencies within and between hazards and building performance, such as the effect of a natural hazard event on long-term durability as well as performance during a subsequent event. This research will investigate an integrated framework to support early building design decisions by identifying building systems that are consistent with stakeholder preferences and optimal over multiple hazards as well as multiple indicators of resiliency and sustainability. The decision support system will synthesize best practices in building design and research in performance-based design, life-cycle assessment, and decision support methodologies. Results of this research will inform the design of mid-rise commercial buildings exposed to coastal and seismic hazards. These buildings are essential to community and governmental disaster-response functions as well as community economic resiliency. Educational and outreach activities will increase awareness of multi-hazard resiliency and sustainability issues in practice and graduate study, will foster interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields among K-12 and undergraduate students, including three research experiences for undergraduate students supported annually, and will enhance the diversity of the science and engineering student community.
Currently available methods adequately address the independent design of resilient and sustainable soil, foundation, structure, and envelope (SFSE) building subsystems. However, an integrated decision support methodology is required to account for interdependencies between hazards and SFSE system performance. An outcome of this research will be a decision support framework for multi-hazard building design that will provide robust estimates of resiliency and full life-cycle sustainability over a broad set of SFSE systems and multiple hazards. The decision support framework will integrate the full spectrum of hazard intensity as well as interdependent hazards and performance to identify optimal and preference-consistent candidate SFSE systems. Assessment of SFSE systems will occur in three phases: (1) generation of site-appropriate SFSE alternatives using a rating method to identify applicable systems and their subsystem interdependencies, (2) probabilistic multi-hazard resiliency and sustainability performance assessment based on site- and SFSE-specific hazard, fragility, and loss curves, and (3) multi-objective and multi-criteria optimization of performance metrics to prioritize candidate systems. This research will create the decision framework and develop methodologies for incorporating hazards and SFSE systems, generate models and datasets for mid-rise office buildings under hurricane, earthquake and tsunami hazards, study the sensitivity of results to uncertainty, and apply the framework to a case study building.
