Achieving Sustainable Building Maintenance through Optimizing Life-Cycle Carbon, Cost, and Labor: Case in Hong Kong

AbstractThe need to maintain an ever-increasing building stock especially in developed economies is growing. This study provides a computational framework to find the optimal solution for sustainable building maintenance. The methodology is composed of two major steps. First, the authors evaluate the life-cycle carbon emission, cost, and labor requirements of a project, which embody important environmental, economic, and social aspects of sustainable building maintenance. Second, the authors develop an optimization model to identify the optimal portfolio of materials that would minimize three sustainability objectives including carbon emission, cost, and labor deployment in their respective turns one at a time. By testing the model with seven scenarios in a case study, the authors demonstrate how this typical case project could significantly improve its sustainability objectives from environmental, economic, and social perspectives. This optimization methodology is generic. It can be readily applied to ot...

[1]  Yimin Zhu,et al.  Comparative Study of Activity-Based Construction Labor Productivity in the United States and China , 2011 .

[2]  H. Welsch,et al.  Energy-Capital-Labor Substitution and the Economic Effects of CO2 Abatement: Evidence for Germany , 2000 .

[3]  Piyush Tiwari,et al.  Sustainable Practices to Meet Shelter Needs in India , 2003 .

[4]  David Pearce,et al.  Is the construction sector sustainable?: definitions and reflections , 2006 .

[5]  Geoffrey P. Hammond,et al.  Embodied energy and carbon in construction materials , 2008 .

[6]  M. Fesanghary,et al.  Design of low-emission and energy-efficient residential buildings using a multi-objective optimization algorithm , 2012 .

[7]  C. Lee,et al.  Final report of the Construction Industry Institute, Hong Kong research project on reinventing the Hong Kong construction industry for its sustainable development , 2008 .

[8]  Kazunori Hokao,et al.  A methodology for energy-efficient renovation of existing residential buildings in China and case st , 2011 .

[9]  Rosa Duarte,et al.  Size and linkages of the Spanish construction industry: key sector or deformation of the economy? , 2011 .

[10]  Hugo Hens,et al.  Life Cycle Optimization of Extremely Low Energy Dwellings , 2007 .

[11]  Evangelos Grigoroudis,et al.  Decision support methodologies on the energy efficiency and energy management in buildings , 2009 .

[12]  I. Weintraub Energy Efficiency Manual , 2000 .

[13]  Albert P.C. Chan,et al.  Modeling and Forecasting Construction Labor Demand: Multivariate Analysis , 2008 .

[14]  Sevastianos Mirasgedis,et al.  European residential buildings and empirical assessment of the Hellenic building stock, energy consumption, emissions and potential energy savings , 2007 .

[15]  Robert Lowe,et al.  Addressing the challenges of climate change for the built environment , 2007 .

[16]  James M. W. Wong,et al.  Time series forecasts of the construction labour market in Hong Kong: the Box‐Jenkins approach , 2005 .

[17]  Francis K.W. Wong,et al.  The impact of urban renewal to the labour force in Hong Kong , 2010 .

[18]  Jyoti K. Parikh,et al.  Performance evaluation of cost effective buildings—A cost, emissions and employment point of view , 1996 .

[19]  J. Dennis,et al.  A closer look at drawbacks of minimizing weighted sums of objectives for Pareto set generation in multicriteria optimization problems , 1997 .

[20]  Michael J. Kelly,et al.  Retrofitting the existing UK building stock , 2009 .

[21]  Jyoti K. Parikh,et al.  Structural Design Considerations in House Builders' Model: Optimization Approach , 1999 .

[22]  S. Broadberry,et al.  Labor productivity in the United States and the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century , 2006 .

[23]  Piyush Tiwari,et al.  Energy efficiency and building construction in India , 2001 .

[24]  Evangelos Grigoroudis,et al.  A multi-objective decision model for the improvement of energy efficiency in buildings , 2010 .

[25]  A. Wood,et al.  The dark side of conscientiousness : conscientious people experience greater drops in life satisfaction following unemployment , 2010 .

[26]  Belfield and Everest Davis Spon's Architects' and Builders' Price Book , 1991 .

[27]  L. Gustavsson,et al.  Variability in energy and carbon dioxide balances of wood and concrete building materials , 2006 .

[28]  Ka Wah Chui,et al.  Comparison of Construction Labor Productivity between U.S. and China: Using On-Site Productivity Measurement Methods , 2010 .

[29]  Lei Zhang,et al.  Greenhouse gas emissions in building construction: A case study of One Peking in Hong Kong , 2010 .

[30]  John Raftery,et al.  The Construction Sector in the Asian Economies , 2004 .

[31]  Albert P.C. Chan,et al.  Forecasting the demand for construction skills in Hong Kong , 2006 .