Fuzzy-AHP Based Design and Performance Indexing Model for Tall Buildings

Abstract

AbstractThe exponential increase in population has led to increasing demands for residential and business spaces in the past few decades. People and designers are now inclined to utilise tight spaces and build tall buildings in order to accommodate more in lesser area of land. The design of a tall building requires multi-dimensional concerns like sustaining the heavy dead load, seismic design considerations, provisions for wind-induced vibrations, the safety of occupants during a hazardous event like a fire outbreak, the safe, proper and timely evacuation of the occupants is very crucial. Several qualitative parameters have to be dealt with in the decision-making process for the adoption of suitable and adequate structural features in tall buildings which makes it a difficult and time taking process. AHP is a well-known multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique to express qualitative measures in quantitative terms. In an effort to handle the ambiguity of the qualitative assessment by humans, the concept of the fuzzy theory has been integrated into the AHP technique by many researchers. In the current study, the critical factors, building bye-laws and guidelines, past observations by researchers that express and determine the design and service-life performance of tall buildings were reviewed and identified, and later on, categorised and transformed into a simplified hierarchical model. The current study focuses on the development of performance assessment index model for tall buildings using fuzzy-AHP technique. The indexing tool developed in this study is then applied to data acquired for some selected existing tall buildings in order to study the feasibility of this model. A detailed comparison of design provisions and ranking of these buildings based on their scores is executed. This fuzzy-AHP model can be employed in comparing or ranking of tall buildings based on the inherent design and safety attributes that may determine its performance during service life. Some general findings and suggestions to further improve the performance of such tall buildings have also been elaborated.KeywordsTall buildingsAerodynamic modificationFuzzy scienceFuzzy-analytic hierarchy processFire safetyCorner shortening