CAREER: From Performance-Based Engineering to Resilience and Sustainability: Design and Assessment Principles for the Next Generation of Buildings

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The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award is to create a unified design and assessment methodology that accounts for the various ways that cost, resilience to hazards, resource consumption, and environmental and social impacts are interconnected throughout a building's service life. A major challenge related to developing the next generation of buildings in the United States is increasing their resilience to natural hazards, while, at the same time, incorporating sustainable practices into their construction, maintenance, and operation over their lifespan. Current approaches to quantifying building performance are largely based on individual attributes such as energy efficiency, resilience to hazards, or cost. However, these attributes are often in conflict with each other, making definitive design solutions elusive. Through a unified design and assessment methodology, this holistic treatment of a building's life cycle performance will provide insights into the possible benefits, interdependencies, and tradeoffs associated with specific resilience and sustainability strategies. The research findings will be integrated into the educational and public outreach components of the project including (a) new curricula that prepares future practitioners, academic faculty, and decision-makers to address complex building design, assessment, and management problems, (b) sustained engagement in initiatives to recruit and retain underrepresented minorities and women in structural/earthquake engineering, and (c) an interactive exhibit that will be showcased at various community-based institutions in the Los Angeles area, to raise public awareness of the opportunities and challenges faced when implementing strategies to enhance the resilience and sustainability of buildings. A discrete-event simulation model will be used to quantify, in a probabilistic manner, the effect of earthquake-related disruption on a building's service life functionality. The model will account for the interaction among seismic resilience and economic, environmental, and social impacts. Life cycle performance optimization algorithms will be formulated to consider multiple stakeholder preferences and objectives. Another aspect of the research will be directed towards creating a multi-criteria decision-making framework that supports the design and service life management of seismic building systems. The scientific methods and tools to be developed as part of the research program will be evaluated and validated by using them to conduct case studies in the design and life cycle assessment for a set of real buildings. The research program will benefit the broader society by enabling developers to provide more compelling reasons to owners in both the private and public sectors to request enhanced building systems with resilient and sustainable features that exceed the minimum performance level found in most U.S. design codes. The value derived from improved service-life functionality and reduced life cycle environmental and economic costs will have the potential to offer building owners dramatically greater returns on their investment.