Decision Support System for circular integrated floor-system design in office buildings (Netherlands)

Abstract

The past few years has seen an increase in number of demolitions of office buildings due to the lack of adaptability based on rapid user change demands, in the Netherlands. Furthermore, the construction industry contributes towards 50% of the raw material consumption and is responsible for 40% of the total waste generation in the country. Leading to adopting circular design practices within the industry which is incentivized by the nationwide programme towards creating a 100% circular economy by 2050 with an intermediate goal to reduce the use of primary raw materials and by 50% until 2030. This has led to exploring flexible and adaptable design strategies in office buildings. In a building floor-systems cater to more than 50% of the total material usage, thereby contributing to the highest impact on the environment. But a floor-system in a building is not always a standalone component, it shares heavy interactions with services such as mechanical, electrical and plumbing installations. Services integration into the floor-system poses flexibility related challenges, as it often interacts with building products that are of varying have varying durability (life spans). An integrated floor-system approach is a multidisciplinary problem and one of the key challenges is flexibility. Furthermore, multi-disciplinary design decisions made in the early design stages create a huge impact on the flexibility, environment and material circularity aspects. Therefore, this research aims to address the complexity of this problem by developing a knowledge based decision support system driven by data and heuristic logic, that can support the decision-makers involved in the early design stages of an integrated floor-system design. The objective is for the system to demonstrate the impact of design decisions on circularity related indicators by sharing quick insights.