Mission-Guided Resilience Investment Allocation for Buildings on DoD Installations

Abstract

Resilience-based design is emerging as an important frontier in the building design community, seeking to better support communities to absorb and recover from adverse events. Currently the minimum requirements of modern building codes do not adequately address resilience, leaving such concerns to be addressed by developers, engineers, and other stakeholders. The need for resilience-focused design, retrofit, and reconstruction planning is particularly pressing for the United States Department of Defense (DoD), which owns a large portfolio of building across the US and abroad that are exposed to a wide range of hazards. In recent years, DoD installations have suffered severe and prolonged disruption to functionality due to building damage from hurricanes and earthquakes, underscoring the need for more resilient design practices. In distributing limited funds to enhance the resilience of a portfolio of installation assets, some buildings must be prioritized over others to maximize the impact of each dollar on resilience of installation functions and missions. In this research, a methodology was developed to distribute limited funds among a group of buildings for resilience enhancements. An incremental investment approach was devised which distributes resources to each building based on its relative need for performance improvement, cost-effectiveness, and the importance of the building to the installation’s missions. Importance to missions is characterized by the Mission Dependency Index (MDI), a DoD metric that conveys the extent to which a building’s function can be interrupted without adversely impacting missions and how easily the functions served by the building can be relocated in the event of a disruption. The methodology is demonstrated through the design of four RC buildings of varying importance for a hypothetical site on the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station in Ridgecrest, California. The results demonstrate that the methodology was able to balance the need, cost-effectiveness, and importance of the four buildings when distributing limited funds.