In hazard-prone areas, hazard-induced maintenance costs can be significant over the lifetime of a building. In fact, the costs of hazard-related repairs can exceed the initial building cost. Our team has developed a building life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) approach that incorporates operational costs associated with energy consumption and repairs due to damage from hazards. Our case studies have demonstrated that investing in more hazard-resistant residential construction in certain locations is very cost-effective.
News
- Hurricane-resistant construction may be undervalued by billions of dollars annually (July 2022)
- MIT Climate Portal: Climate-Resilient Infrastructure (September 2021)
- MIT News: Mitigating hazards with vulnerability in mind (September 2021)
- The Hill: Climate Resilience is the New Sustainability (May 2021)
- Building to Better Weather the Storm (MIT News, June 2017)
- Build disaster-proof homes before storms strike, not afterward (The Conversation, August 2016)
- New approach calculates benefits of building hazard-resistant structures (MIT News, December 2016)
Topic Summaries
- Fact Sheet: Resilient Buildings (May 2020)
- Topic Summary: City Texture and Urban Resilience (March 2020)
- Information Sheet: Building Resilience (May 2018)
- Building Life Cycle Cost Analysis: Life Cycle Costs of Hazard Resistant Buildings (February 2017)
Research Briefs
- Kinetic temperature of structures: a new approach for building resilience assessment (April 2023)
- Measuring Cost Burden of Hurricane Repairs on Socially Vulnerable Households (October 2022)
- Molecular Dynamics-based Resilience Assessment of Structures (May 2021)
- Incorporating Neighborhood Texture Into Hurricane Loss Estimation (March 2021)
- Precipitation Flooding in Urban Environments (March 2021)
- Molecular Dynamics-based Resilience Assessment of Structures (July 2020)
- Generating Building-specific Fragility Curves (May 2019)
- Validation of Molecular Dynamics-Based Structural Damage Models (March 2019)
- Creating Customized Fragility Curves for Resilient Building (November 2018)
- Resilience Assessment of Structures Using Molecular Dynamics (June 2018)
- Prioritizing Resilient Retrofits (February 2018)
- Planning More Resilient Cities (March 2017)
- A Break-Even Hazard Mitigation Metric (July 2016)
- Quantifying Hazard Life-Cycle Cost (August 2014)
- Hazard Mitigation Assessment Methodologies (August 2013)
- Quantitative Assessment of Resilience in Residential Building Envelope Systems (March 2013)
Publications
- Keremides, Konstantinos; Qomi, Mohammad Javad Abdolhosseini; Pellenq, Roland J. M.; and Ulm, Franz-Josef. “Potential-of-Mean-Force Approach for Molecular Dynamics–Based Resilience Assessment of Structures” Journal of Engineering Mechanics, Volume 144, Issue 8 (2018)
- Keremidis, K., Vartziotis, T., & Ulm, F. J. (2023). Kinetic Temperature of Structures for Resilience, Instability, and Failure Analysis of Building Systems. Journal of Engineering Mechanics, 149(2), 04022110.
- Manav, Ipek Bensu, et al. “Texture-Informed Approach for Hurricane Loss Estimation: How Discounting Neighborhood Texture Leads to Undervaluing Wind Mitigation.” Natural Hazards Review 23.4 (2022): 05022006.
- Noori, M., Miller, R., Kirchain, R., Gregory, J., “How much should be invested in hazard mitigation? Development of a streamlined hazard mitigation cost assessment framework,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (2018)
- Noshadravan, A.; Miller, T.R.; and Gregory, J. “A Lifecycle Cost Analysis of Residential Buildings Including Natural Hazard Risk” Journal of Construction and Engineering Management (2007).