Modular Preference Function Development Strategy for the Design of Multi-Hazard Resilient and Sustainable Buildings

An exponential growth in natural hazards has led to a loss of building functionality and cascading impacts on communities. As stakeholders have a significant impact on the design of office buildings, this paper presents a framework for assessing stakeholder preferences with respect to the decision metrics of life-cycle cost, environmental impact, and loss of resilience considering the occurrence of natural hazard events. A unitless preference function is determined that can be used in the early design of building soil, structure, foundation, and envelope systems with respect to earthquake, tsunami, and hurricane hazards. This preference function is designed in a way to account for a range of building performances from the best-performing to the worst-performing building configuration with respect to natural hazards in addition to multiple decision makers, and building soil, structure, foundation and envelope subsystems and systems.