Sustainable Decisions for Life-Cycle Based Design and Maintenance

Authors

Kazuyoshi Nishijima, Daniel Straub and Michael H. Faber

Abstract

General aspects of sustainable decision making are investigated and a possible formulation of socio-economical sustainable decision making is illustrated on the problem of life-cycle based design and maintenance of civil engineering facilities. First an overview is given on the present understanding of sustainability indicators and on available theoretical and methodical frameworks for including such indicators in sustainable decision making. Thereafter basic principles of sustainable decision making are suggested by defining the "rules" for optimizing decisions that are made at present but may have consequences in the future. A decision-theoretical framework is then formulated which allows for modeling the interaction between intra-generational decision making and inter-generational decision making, utilizing the recently developed concept of agent based systems representation. The suggested framework is general but is here illustrated on the specific and simple decision problem related to life-cycle based design and maintenance of civil engineering facilities. For this problem, sustainable decisions are identified through minimization of the joint economical consequences for the present and future generations related to design and maintenance over the life cycle of such facilities. The suggested approach is demonstrated on a specific example considering the optimization of a concrete structure subject to chloride induced corrosion of the reinforcement.

Published in/by

Accepted for publication in International Journal of Risk Assessment and Management.