COASTAL HAZARDS @ VIRGINIA TECH
RSB: Performance-based Decision Support System for Resilient & Sustainable Multi-Hazard Building Design
PI: Madeleine Flint
Co-PIs: Jesus de la Garza, Matthew Eatherton, Jennifer Irish, & Guney Olgun
Co-PIs: Jesus de la Garza, Matthew Eatherton, Jennifer Irish, & Guney Olgun
Funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. CMMI 1455466)
The high social, economic, and environmental impacts associated with events such as the 2011 Tohoku, Japan earthquake and tsunami, and 2012 Hurricane Sandy are unsustainable. To increase community resilience against such extreme events, building engineers and architects must select designs that will perform satisfactorily under any and all hazard scenarios that may occur during a building's lifetime. Designers of resilient and sustainable buildings must therefore balance multiple competing interests. They must minimize both initial construction impacts and reconstruction impacts associated with unknown future extreme events. They must make tradeoffs between designs that optimize for one hazard to the detriment of performance under a different hazard. Finally, they must account for interdependencies within and between hazards and building performance, such as the effect of a natural hazard event on long-term durability as well as performance during a subsequent event. This research investigates an integrated framework to support early building design decisions by identifying building systems that are consistent with stakeholder preferences and optimal over multiple hazards as well as multiple indicators of resiliency and sustainability. The decision support system will synthesize best practices in building design and research in performance-based design, life-cycle assessment, and decision support methodologies. Results of this research will inform the design of mid-rise commercial buildings exposed to coastal and seismic hazards. These buildings are essential to community and governmental disaster-response functions as well as community economic resiliency. [text modified from NSF summary]
Acknowledgements & Credits: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Background photo courtesy of Sadatsugu Tomizawa (Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
© 2016 Jennifer L. Irish & Robert Weiss. All Rights Reserved.