A decision-making framework for life-cycle energy and seismic loss assessment of buildings

Abstract

The integration of building seismic losses and environmental impacts is a key step toward the improvement of building design approaches accounting for resilience and sustainability in parallel. A decision-making framework including the life-cycle energy assessment and seismic loss estimation is proposed in this study in order to investigate the trade-offs between buildings’ environmental sustainability and reducing seismic loss. The framework includes a Pareto front analysis to reach a balance among the criteria. Building operational energy, embodied energy, seismic repair cost, and injuries were the performance metrics considered. The framework was applied to three reinforced concrete building designs including low- to high-rise buildings along with six exterior wall assemblies and four Window-to-Wall-Ratios. The contradictory trend among the performance metrics underlines the importance of merging these concepts for the development of the current building design methodologies. The hypervolume indicator was computed for each building’s Pareto front set to evaluate the quality of Pareto front design solutions. The results showed that compared to the 20-story building, the 2- and 12-story buildings have higher number of Pareto solution points and the solutions are of higher qualities in terms of diversity and proximity to the true Pareto front based on the hypervolume indicator solutions.

Keywords:

• Life-cycle energy
• seismic loss estimation
• operational energy
• embodied energy
• multi-objective optimisation
• Pareto front analysis

Acknowledgments

This study was funded through a Texas A&M Triads for Transformation (T3) Seed Funding supporting innovative and interdisciplinary research projects as part of the Texas A&M’s President’s Excellence Fund. This financial support is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.