The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project is to minimize human and monetary losses incurred every year due to wind-related damage to buildings and other similar structures. In the recent years, wind hazards have caused significant building repair costs, placing tremendous burden on their owners and insurance companies. To reduce the vulnerability of buildings to extreme wind events, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, a holistic platform is required to (1) estimate the risk of failure of a building under the expected intensity and frequency of occurrence of windstorms in a given region; and (2) inform the involved entities, including design consultants, contractors, stakeholders, and insurance companies, on how to avoid the risk of failure through innovative design and mitigation strategies. While the former aspect has been studied to some extent by the involved agencies and companies, the latter aspect has remained largely unexplored, due to technical complexities, budget constraints, and the absence of supporting guides and tools. This has motivated the development of the very first wind performance-based risk assessment and mitigation tool.
The proposed project will result in a multi-purpose tool to transform the analysis and design of buildings subjected to wind hazards. This is a unique innovation, as it employs, for the first time, the concepts of risk assessment and mitigation together to maximize the safety and performance of buildings in high-wind areas. For assessment purposes, this tool relies on a performance-based philosophy, which offers versatile capabilities to optimize the design in such a way that the cost is minimized, while the target performance objectives are achieved. On the other hand, for mitigation purposes, a decision-making algorithm is implemented to consider multiple strategies and identify the best solution based on a range of performance, cost, and risk metrics. This will be an important step forward to address the challenges that have prevented the building sector from ensuring the safety and comfort of buildings against wind loads. The innovation of the proposed tool, however, will not be limited to its simulation capabilities, data-driven algorithms, and predictive models, as it will deliver a platform that greatly facilitates the communication and collaboration among various entities involved in the finance, design, maintenance, and insurance of buildings.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
