Advancing the Design of Resilient and Sustainable Buildings: An Integrated Life-Cycle Analysis

Abstract

A holistic evaluation of a building’s environmental impact must include a thorough accounting of both its operating and embodied energies, inclusive of the influence of hazard-induced damage and repairs. Unfortunately, these considerations are notoriously absent in today’s practice owing to a traditionally segmented approach to the design process that has perpetuated interoperability challenges between existing commercial tools. In response to this and other limitations of existing approaches, this paper offers an integrated life-cycle assessment (iLCA) that (1) considers the effects of site-specific climate and exposure to wind and seismic hazards on a building’s embodied and operating energy, (2) adopts an assembly-based approach to reveal the specific components influencing performance outcomes, (3) accommodates both risk-neutral and risk-adverse perspectives, and (4) addresses interoperability challenges that limit access to the data stored within commercial building information models. The resulting iLCA is partitioned into a sustainability workflow, with modules dedicated to embodied and operating energy, and a resilience workflow, sequencing modules for hazard characterization, structural response, damage, and repair/loss. A custom parser leverages semantic technologies to efficiently extract geometry and material information from the underlying data structures of Revit building information models; this parser ultimately supplies the required building data to each module. A unifying probabilistic framework is then adopted to quantify life-cycle performance, in terms of repair costs and total (embodied and operating) energy, with emphasis placed on expanding the statistical descriptions of performance to support both risk-neutral and risk-averse decision-making. The iLCA is applied to a case study office building at two sites to demonstrate the effects of climate and wind and seismic hazards on the performance of specific components over different service lives, inclusive of potential performance variability due to hazard exposure. The framework is further leveraged to examine how different sources of uncertainty, or assumptions surrounding the quantification of this uncertainty, impact life-cycle performance estimates.

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