A decision support tool for climate-informed and socioeconomic urban design

Abstract

We develop a novel statistical decision-theoretic framework for urban design from an outdoor thermal comfort (OTC), social and economic perspectives. We combine those aspects into spatio-temporal risk measures which provide a compact representation of the overall quality of an urban design scenarios (UDS) set. We then formulate the selection of the optimal design as an optimization problem which is easy to solve and has a clear interpretation. To illustrate how our framework can be used in practice, we present a real-world study, which is based on a set of UDS that aim to improve the OTC of a specific site in Singapore. We show how our framework provides decision makers the flexibility to make choices relevant to their design objectives, leading to informed and interpretable design option selection.