Towards Resilient High Performance Low-rise Office Buildings

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Under the current building design practice, it is quite common to have a performance gap between the predicted and actual energy performance; particularly for high performance buildings, in which the predicted low energy consumption is susceptible to actual varying operating conditions, which in many cases, are stochastic in nature. In fact, the performance gap is mainly due to the deterministic assumptions made in both the building design and simulation model. A resilient building performs according to its intended design under varying conditions. The main obstacle in achieving a resilient building is the lack of quantification method of the performance gap, and the corresponding evaluation approach to identify resilient building design solutions. Low-rise office buildings are studied for their significant energy saving potential due to their prominent presence in suburban areas. The proposed research program aims to develop design methodology and tools to achieve the goal of resilient high performance buildings with significant performance improvement in energy performance, cost effectiveness, and environmental impact. Data mining techniques will be used to process actual building data into stochastic input data sets. A verified stochastic model will be used to evaluate the energy performance as a probability function. The probability function will be translated into a single value risk indicator to facilitate decision making. Resilience will be evaluated on three approaches (i) robustness evaluation - testing the ability to maintain the intended performance with static configurations (ii) adaptability evaluation - testing the ability to resume to their designed state with dynamic measures (iii) flexibility evaluation - testing the ability to accommodate voluntary and foreseeable changes. An extensive performance database will be generated for identifying highly advanced resilient low-rise building design solutions. The expected outcome is a novel design methodology to quantify and identify resilient high performance building solutions in three design aspects: energy performance, cost effectiveness, and environmental impact, by considering risk level under adverse operating conditions. The verified stochastic model is believed to mitigate the gap between the predicted and actual energy performance and hence make construction of resilient high performance low-rise office buildings a step closer to reality.