Sustainable and Resilient Engineering for Facade Design under Uncertainty in the Tropics

Yidan Gao, Umberto Alibrandi, Khalid M. mosalam*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal/Conference contribution in journal/Contribution to newspaperJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Traditional facade design practices are mostly based on the designers' intuition or a single performance criterion such as U-and g-values, which only describe a single facade property. However, facade optimal design in an early stage has a significant influence on the final overall building performance in regard to energy consumption, economical cost, CO2 emission, etc. The main challenge is represented by several sources of uncertainty during the life-cycle. In this paper, the goal of finding a sustainable facade design solution is addressed through the reliability framework of sustainable and resilient engineering (SRE), which is used to predict probabilistic performances, whereas the design alternatives are ranked through the multiattribute utility theory. The adopted metric for ranking these alternatives is the generalized expected utility (GEU), which incorporates the expected utility as a particular case. It is recognized that, under limited and incomplete information, decision-makers are risk-Averse, which may provide a suboptimal design. Within the GEU, the optimal design under uncertainty is modeled through superquantiles, which allow evaluating the optimal design with respect to frequent events (i.e., service limit states) and extreme events (i.e., ultimate limit state). It is shown that SRE can include traditional design approaches as particular cases. The main features of the proposed framework are demonstrated through an application to a facade design of a hypothetical commercial office in Singapore with three types of facade options. With the output of the simulations through the EnergyPlus software, the alternatives are successfully ranked using SRE and compared with traditional design practices. The case study shows that the proposed methodology has the potential to overcome the limitation of the current design process and to guide the procurement processes in early facade design.

Original languageEnglish
Article number04024015
JournalJournal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems - Part A : Civil Engineering
Volume10
Issue2
ISSN2376-7642
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2024

Keywords

  • Building facade design
  • EnergyPlus
  • Generalized expected utility (GEU)
  • Multiattribute utility theory
  • Performance-based engineering
  • Sustainable and resilient engineering (SRE)

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Sustainable and Resilient Engineering for Facade Design under Uncertainty in the Tropics'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this