Improving organisational resilience to disaster events: an FM perspective

Background and aim - Improving the resilience of business organisations and critical infrastructure providers to disaster events is a major challenge facing many European organisations. Recent floods in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and earthquakes in Iceland, Italy, Romania and Greece have demonstrated the need for organisations to adopt...

Sustainability assessment method for healthcare buildings: criteria for materials selection in the Portuguese context

The health sector has a strong influence on the economy of nations and their policies and is based in a group of buildings where the quality of the indoor and outdoor environment is quite important. The impacts of these buildings are relevant compared to other buildings because they are directly related to human health. The healthcare providers...

Multi-Objective Optimization and Decision Aid for Spread Footing Design in Uncertain Environment

This paper aims to present an evaluation, optimization and comparison approach for the design of isolated spread foundations in an uncertain environment. The choice of the optimal solution is made according to the decision-maker's preferences to find the best compromise between various conflicting objectives. Furthermore, this approach takes...

Are clients, architects and juries becoming environmental? -A critical view on the competition briefs and the juries’ assessments in relation to the outcome in ten school competitions

This paper first examines how evaluation criteria for judging architecture evolve over time. Secondly it takes a look on how new assessment criteria are emphasized when judging architecture. Finally this paper seeks to study to what degree the new assessment criterion, whether a project is environmental or not, is emphasized. This is studied...

Graphical Smalltalk with My Optimization System for Urban Planning Tasks

Based on the description of a conceptual framework for the representation of planning problems on various scales, we introduce an evolutionary design optimization system. This system is exemplified by means of the generation of street networks with locally defined properties for centrality. We show three different scenarios for planning...

Conceptual framework for potential implementations of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methods for design quality assessment

Architectural design can be considered as a process influenced by many stakeholders, each of which has different decision power. Each stakeholder might have his/her own criteria and weightings depending on his/her own perspective and role. Hence design can be seen as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) process. Considering architectural...

Towards the use of project alliance: Joint development of a team selection procedure as an example of steps taken

Project alliance is a relatively fresh project delivery method where the owner and service providers, the designer and the constructor, share the risks of the project in order to intensify their collaboration for the best of the project. Experiences from the model from “down under”, where it has broken through, reached Finland some years ago....

Selection criteria and tender evaluation: The equivalent tender price model (ETPM)

Several research studies have identified critical success factors and their impact on project success. Central to both success and failure is the issue of selection criteria, and the importance of incorporating qualitative factors when contracting for complex design and construction projects. Empirical findings suggest that price is still...

A conceptual model for the development of household sustainable consumption indicators

Despite the diversity of tools to measure household consumption, indicators are one of the approaches with great potential, due to their communication and comprehensible easiness for non-scientific public, like families. The main objective of this research was the development of a framework to define the main steps and criteria to built...

The role of human factors in the adoption of sustainable design criteria in business

Implementing sustainability in business is steadily gaining more attention. A growing number of companies currently work on the implementation of sustainable criteria in the design related departments and their design processes. Although theory and methods are available, practice shows that this integration process of sustainability criteria is...

The integration of social criteria in sustainable design for furniture

Sustainable design is a complex area that integrates a wide range of environmental, social and economic criteria. This paper is part of a research (www.designsustentavel.org) that intends to develop a toolkit and information for wood furniture designers to use in their work process and that should push this product range closer to the...