Front matter for Resilient and Sustainable Buildings

Integrating Resilience and Sustainability into Civil Engineering Projects, edited by Caroline Field and Chris Zawislak (ASCE/IRD 2023). IRP 6 describes how the engineering community is working to integrate social science, policy, and economics into the planning, design, and management decisions surrounding physical infrastructure projects. (ISBN 978-0-7844-8481-4)

Leveraging Sustainable Infrastructure for Resilient Communities, edited by Michael F. Bloom and Krishna R. Reddy (ASCE/Committee on Sustainability 2021). This collection contains 13 peer-reviewed papers on best practices in sustainability presented at the International Conference on Sustainable Infrastructure 2021, held virtually December 6–10, 2021. (ISBN 978-0-7844-8387-9)

Resilience-Based Performance: Next Generation Guidelines for Buildings and Lifeline Standards, by the Risk and Resilience Measurement Committee (ASCE/IRD 2019). IRP 3 discusses the enhancements that are needed in the design and construction of buildings and lifeline systems to support a community's social stability, economic vitality, and environmental sustainability. (ISBN 978-0-7844-1527-6)

Hazard-Resilient Infrastructure: Analysis and Design, edited by Bilal M. Ayyub. (ASCE/IRD 2021). MOP 144 provides guidance and underlying framework for creating consistency across hazards, systems, and sectors in the design of new infrastructure systems and in enhancing the resilience of existing ones. (ISBN 978-0-7844-1575-7)

Climate-Resilient Infrastructure: Adaptive Design and Risk Management, by the Committee on Adaptation to a Changing Climate; edited by Bilal M. Ayyub (ASCE/CACC 2018). MOP 140 provides guidance for developing or enhancing of methods for infrastructure analysis and design to achieve infrastructure resilience targets while minimizing life-cycle costs in a changing climate. (ISBN 978-0-7844-1519-1)

This book provides an overview of four major projects funded by the National Science Foundation that focused on different aspects of resilient and sustainable buildings (RSBs) ranging from a single building to a full community. The scope of the project was basic research, and although the work performed by each project team was technical in nature, this book provides a higher-level overview of methods and outcomes.The editors envision that a wide range of readers will be interested in learning about these recently completed projects ranging from graduate students in civil engineering, urban planning, and architecture to researchers at federal (and other) laboratories and to engineering and social science practitioners interested in learning about the direction of research on RSB. The format is four chapters, with the first chapter providing the motivation and a short summary of each project chapter. Chapters 1 through 4 focus on a particular RSB project, and Chapter 5 synthesizes the major conclusions and remaining research gaps.

The goal of the Decision Frameworks for Multi-Hazard Resilient and Sustainable Buildings (RSB) solicitation (NSF 14-557) was to advance knowledge for multihazard resilient and sustainable soil–foundation–structural–envelope (SFSE) building systems using decision frameworks for selection among alternative building system designs. This includes a rational decision framework, preferences, concepts for SFSE systems, and design optimization methods for generating and choosing among alternative SFSE systems.

Damage to SFSE building systems resulting from natural hazard events has led to loss of building function and occupancy, leading to a cascading disaster to the community. Buildings designed to be multihazard resilient will contribute toward broader societal goals for communities to recover rapidly from natural disturbances. The notion of continuity of function over time unites resilience and sustainability: buildings that are not resilient in the face of specific disturbances cannot be sustained over the long term, and buildings that are not sustainable cannot, over the long term, persist.

Four projects were awarded under the RSB solicitation. Although the RSB solicitation set forth an overarching goal for the research, overall, each project team approached the research with a unique perspective, methodological approach, and scope, given that design has multiple phases, that buildings are complex systems composed of many subsystems, the interdependencies between individual buildings and the community systems in which they are located, and varying local considerations. Indeed, project scopes and approaches ranged from decision frameworks for the design of an individual buildings to frameworks for community-level decision-making, from residential buildings to mid-rise offices, schools, and mixed-use buildings, as well as different geographical locations, and hence, natural hazard considerations, different aspects of resilience and sustainability, and so forth. The new knowledge, methods, and applications resulting from each team's research efforts over multiple years were disseminated through numerous publications, presentations, and theses/dissertations, each describing a specific aspect, contribution, and/or methodological extension. The purpose of this book is twofold: (1) to provide a comprehensive overview of each of the four multiyear research efforts in a single document; and (2) to highlight commonalities in approaches and methods, differences in methods as a function of scale and hazard, and commonalities in research gaps identified that can serve as a basis for future research directions.

Strong winds such as those produced by tornadoes and hurricanes have resulted in billions of dollars in damage annually and continue to threaten the safety of building occupants. The concept was that it is possible to develop risk-informed performance criteria for individual resilient and sustainable buildings exposed to a spectrum of natural hazards that can be matched to community goals; that building attributes can be identified and parameterized to support this general risk-informed decision framework; and that the risk-informed decision framework supporting these performance criteria for individual buildings will enable enhanced community resilience and sustainability by targeting public and private investments to manage life-cycle costs. In other words, the construction of woodframe buildings to ensure that the community resilience and sustainability goals are met at the whole-community level was examined within this project. It was shown that this can be achieved and resulted in a dashboard of metrics being available to a decision-maker such as the number of injuries, number of fatalities, population outmigration, and performance of the built environment. Population outmigration was a function of the condition and recovery speed of a household's residence, places of work, and schools attended. The intellectual merit of the project was that the attributes that make a community resilient and a building sustainable enabled a decision framework that addresses the paradoxical issue of single-building optimization for community objectives and leads to practical performance-based criteria for a structural system design; and the ability to comprehensively model all major physical and relevant social systems within a community to allow the prediction of key resilience metrics following an event such as a scenario tornado.

A decision framework for multiobjective optimization (MOO) of resilient and sustainable building design. Wind, flood, and earthquake hazards are studied. New methodologies are developed to obtain the joint probability of wind and flood hazards, as these hazards often have a concurrent effect on building resilience; to account for wind and flood hazard nonstationarity; and to estimate building fragility and probability of failure for multiple hazards. New developments in building sustainability are also made. An approach based on morphing is developed to modify current climate data to reflect the environmental conditions predicted by global climate models. The effects of the window-to-wall ratio in buildings are studied using survey data. In terms of optimization and decision-making, a pruning (down-selection) method is presented to obtain a subset of designs from the Pareto optimal set to help bridge the gap between the often large group of optimal design alternatives (DAs) and a single final design, making MOO more accessible to engineers. Decision-makers’ relative preference weights for sustainability and resilience objectives are studied. The MOO framework leads to pruned optimal DAs (in terms of design variables) that can, in turn, lead to a final design based on stakeholders’ preferences.

Chapter 3 describes the development of a mathematical framework that formally treats design decision-making as a sequential decision process (SDP) and its application for the design of resilient and sustainable buildings (RSBs). The design of RSB is a challenging task, in part, due to the need to consider various economic, sustainability, resilience, and other metrics while making decisions about systems comprised of subsystems, each generally consisting of numerous components. The combination of metrics and subsystems translates into numerous design alternatives and trade-offs between conflicting objectives that the designer must negotiate to identify a sufficing solution(s). However, some criteria are difficult and/or computationally demanding to determine, for example, seismic losses using the performance-based earthquake engineering assessment framework, creating a direct conflict with the notion of broad exploration to identify sufficing design solutions. The SDP overcomes this conflict by sequencing models of increasing fidelity that successively provide tighter bounds on the decision criteria, thus facilitating the systematic contraction of the initial set of design alternatives through a sequence of discrete decision states, until a final design can be selected. Key to the systematic contraction is that low-fidelity models provide bounds on the decision criteria that ensure, with high confidence, that only dominated design alternatives are removed from consideration. The SDP is general, in that it can be applied to a variety of disciplines while accommodating: (1) multiple decision criteria/objectives, including any combination of deterministic and probabilistic criteria; (2) multiple constraints; and (3) any combination of external input, for example, seismic, wind, and hurricane forces. Given this, the SDP is demonstrated for the multiobjective optimization of: (1) a seismic force–resisting system considering moment frames, concentrically braced frames, and eccentrically braced frames as conceptual structural alternatives, based on cost and drift; (2) a building's structural–foundation–soil system based on cost and drift; and (3) a building's soil–foundation–structural–envelope system based on probabilistic seismic losses caused by repair actions and structural weight/cost; each example also considers code-based requirements as constraints so that the design solutions are also practical. Other methodological extensions, applications, and demonstrations are also presented and discussed.

Early design is the most critical stage to improve a building's resiliency and sustainability, as the majority of the important decisions—such as subsystem selection, building geometry specification, and components’ form and sizing—are yet to be made. However, these decisions are based on substantially imprecise and uncertain data, and hence, it is not feasible to evaluate them using rigorous performance-based assessment. The lack of detailed performance assessments results in evaluating a limited number of alternatives and, subsequently, missing well-suited options. Chapter 4 presents a modular framework to support early design of resilient and sustainable buildings (RSB) and applies the methodology to select high-performing soil, foundation, structural, and envelope (SFSE) systems that meet different stakeholders’ objectives. The proposed framework comprises three independent modules of generating site-appropriate SFSE, probabilistic assessment of life-cycle performance, and multiobjective reliability-based ranking and optimization. The framework's modularity creates alternative routes to identify optimal SFSEs on the basis of data availability and analysis resolution, where the generic modules can be adapted to different hazards, building types, and decision metrics. Therefore, the proposed framework provides several advantages, namely: (1) fostering the communication of risk and reliability, and infrastructure life-cycle performance in early design; (2) providing a decision-support system for the treatment of error, and incorporation of multiple probabilistic decision criteria in the early design of infrastructures; and (3) reaching a consensus among decision-makers on the optimal infrastructure design configuration that optimizes all decision-maker objectives. A case study of mid-rise frame buildings at Charleston, South Carolina, demonstrated how multiple SFSE systems could perform optimally at a fixed location, where most selected alternatives benefited from beyond-code design. Nonetheless, although it was possible to identify alternatives with a reasonable potential of meeting developer preferences, all configurations were woefully inadequate to the reasonable demands of the occupants and community. This illustration highlights the need to incorporate risk-informed computational tools in the earlier stages of design to ensure that the selected SFSE could meet community needs in terms of resiliency and sustainability.