Selecting Building Designs with Consideration of Sustainability and Resiliency

Sustainability and resiliency against hazards are two important factors in building design. Sustainability parameters or attributes can be evaluated through Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) ratings (scores) and lifecycle assessment (LCA), with respect to energy and material usage, whereas resiliency attributes can be assessed by ductility, wind-borne debris resistance, fragility analysis, and parameters from structural analysis, such as elastic and inelastic drifts under seismic and wind loads. This article presents a multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) method for choosing a building design that reconciles building design parameters that may conflict with each other when both sustainability and resiliency are considered together. For example, some building materials used may be beneficial for withstanding fire hazards but harmful to the environment at the end of their lifecycle. The main novelty of the proposed MADM method is that it can reconcile various conflicting attributes and provide sensitivity analysis information on winning designs when some of the design parameters/attributes are uncertain at the time of making design decisions. Simulation techniques were used to determine a distribution of final design rankings, and a case study of the selection of an office building was conducted to demonstrate the proposed method. The numerical example shows that the proposed framework was able to handle the conflicting attributes applied for the selected case study.