Building Design and Decision-Making for Multihazard Resilience and Sustainability

This chapter discusses the development and application of a quantitative science-based decision-making framework for design of multihazard resilient and sustainable soil-foundation-structure-envelope building systems. A key obstacle to resilience-based design is the high dimensionality of building design and the wide range of potential objectives and constraints applied to it, which hinder decision making. Multi-objective optimization (MOO) is the primary tool used to overcome this obstacle in the framework. The developed framework and methodology incorporate additional building performance objectives and are based on MOO of design variables of interest. The framework consists of four main components: natural hazard characterization, modeling of fragility and damage to building components, building resilience and sustainability assessment, and MOO and decision making. MOO methods are found to be a powerful tool for solving complex engineering design problems. A copula-based joint probability model for wind and flood hazards is also presented.