Toward Holistic Risk-based Building Design Codes
Eun Jeong Cha – Assistant Professor, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Building design codes regulate the safety levels of the built-environment by laying down requirements which ensures that the building structures perform adequately under different loads. Due to the widespread impact, design codes can be one of the most effective ways to manage risk to the built-environment. Yet, holistic risk-based approaches have not been adopted in the building design code development processes, resulting in a potential over/under-preparation of built-environment against future loading conditions. This talk will present two separate efforts toward holistic risk-based building design codes: (1) development of holistic risk-based building target safety level optimization framework and (2) investigation of climate change impact on future hurricane risks. Integrating the holistic risk concept into the building design codes can be challenging because of the rigorousness needed in the prescription process for future building inventory and due to the inherent complexity of holistic risk assessment. To address the issue of unrealistic computation cost, the optimization framework utilizes a neural network for structural response estimation. Also, for the investigation of future hurricane risks, relationships between climate variables and hurricane parameters have been investigated by using nonlinear autoregressive neural networks. The result of the two studies indicates the urgency and necessity of holistic risk-based building design codes.
Eun Jeong Cha is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Dr. Cha holds a Ph.D. (2012) and a M.S. (2009) in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a B.S. (2006) in Architectural Engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea. Her research interests are in the general areas of civil infrastructure risk-based decision-making, including structural safety target optimization, building design load calibration, disaster impact modeling for buildings and infrastructure systems, life-cycle analysis of buildings and infrastructure exposed to extreme events, the role of risk acceptance attitudes in civil engineering decisions, and extended life spans of civil infrastructure projects in planning, design, maintenance and replacement for a sustainable development.
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