Assessing the Thermal Resilience of Buildings Using Multiple Outage Events

Designing adaptive buildings with a satisfactory thermal performance capable of withstanding climate change shocks is as crucial as decarbonizing the built environment. Considering multiple events and their relative significance would facilitate the process of making buildings more adaptive against shocks. This study used a simulation-based method to quantify resilience KPIs, annual energy performance, and life-cycle cost while considering multiple outage events. Due to the results, emphasis was placed on the ice-storm event (relative weights of considered ice storm and heatwave are 0.85 and 0.15, respectively). Also, the thermal resilience improved by a factor of two in the as-built case compared to reference (code-minimum) case. The payback period was reduced from 13 to 5.2 years considering the impact of both ice storm with a 10-years frequency and heatwave with a 3-years frequency. Further studies should consider more events and identify upgrade packages using an optimization approach.