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Blueprints for sustainable structural designs
Journal article

Blueprints for sustainable structural designs

Abstract

Early structural design choices (e.g., types of building materials and systems) have serious impacts on subsequent construction project phases. As such, regulators across the world have been developing and enforcing codes and standards to cap building environmental impacts. In this context, construction must address economic and environmental considerations from the early design stages, for which multi-objective optimization becomes necessary. Although optimization in structural engineering is a century-old topic, its effective implementation remains challenged within structural design practices. This situation is attributed to four key limitations, namely: 1) the lack of industry-oriented software streamlining the needed optimization schemes; 2) the lack of core optimization education; 3) the lack of effective parametric exploration capabilities in typical optimization schemes; and 4) the lack of interoperability of such schemes across different structural materials, components, and systems. As such, this article presents Sustainable Structural Blueprints (S2B): a modular object-oriented schema which structural designers and researchers can both develop transferable optimization pipelines and launch relevant parametric investigations. To demonstrate the S2B utility, an application is presented in this paper, where the parametric designs of masonry beams are explored, and optimal designs are generated based on structural, economic, and environmental criteria. The presented S2B facilitates the practical integration of urban green building standards into the foundational stages of structural design.

Authors

Talaat A; Ezzeldin M; El-Dakhakhni W

Journal

Structures, Vol. 87, ,

Publisher

Elsevier

Publication Date

May 1, 2026

DOI

10.1016/j.istruc.2026.111561

ISSN

2352-0124

Labels

Fields of Research (FoR)

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)

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