Are Reliability, Resilience, Robustness, and Vulnerability Interrelated? A Survey Study on Thermal Performance of Buildings

Climate change is forcing building specialists to design adaptive buildings that can handle stronger events occurring more frequently. While long-term effects of climate change are addressed using mitigation strategies, their instant impacts (e.g., extreme weather events) are less considered. We need concepts like reliability, resilience, robustness, and vulnerability to quantify these short-term impacts, and there is no consensus on a unique definition for them. Using a survey, this paper investigates how researchers and industry experts interpreted these concepts and to what extent they consider them essential. By reviewing the literature, flexible and comprehensive definitions for each concept are proposed. The survey aims to: (i) clarify respondents’ ideas about these concepts and evaluate the significance of them compared to other features of HPBs, (ii) estimate respondents’ interpretations about the thermal performance of High-Performance Buildings (HPBs) using these concepts, and (iii) quantify the relative importance of reliability, resilience, robustness, and vulnerability based on event types and building archetypes. Survey outcomes indicated an inherent bias toward the term resilience and relatively less awareness of how these concepts overlap significantly that could be solved using a central framework. Also, quantifying the impact of event type and building archetype could be another critical step toward designing optimally adaptive buildings.