LIFE CYCLE DESIGN FOR BUILDING STRUCTURES

Abstract

Recently, the environmental impact has been required to be explicitly taken into account in a life cycle design of building structures besides the initial economical efficiency, which has been ordinarily required up to the present days. Consequently, it is important not only to design the building structures so as to be safe as well as economical at the initial stage of completion of the building but also to pay attention and take into account the total behaviors of the designed and constructed building structures during all stages of their life cycles. The former paper of the authors has proposed the way to deal with the life cycle design of building structures with consideration of a hierarchy according to the ranks of building construction systems by using genetic algorithms as the optimization scheme with respect to both ecology and economy for evaluations. However, there are various uncertenties in a life cycle of building structures, therefore it is necessary to expand it to the life cycle evaluation that considered those uncertenties. In particular, the effect caused by earthquakes which occurs during the evaluation period should be investigated. Present paper proposes the way to realize the life cycle evaluation of building structures with consideration of seismic hazard, and investigate its effectiveness of Life Cycle Design considering seismic hazard through numerical examples.