Forward-Looking Building Standards Workshops and Roadmap

Summary

This project focuses on identifying methods and practices for incorporating future hazards and conditions into codes and standards to support the resilience of buildings, infrastructure, and communities. 
 

Description

Objective
Publish A Roadmap to Advance Standards for the Built Environment Subject to Future Hazards and Conditions.

Technical idea
Engineers, planners, and communities are addressing future hazards and conditions to meet client requests and are looking for consensus guidance and standards to support their practice and decision-making. Currently, this challenge is being addressed ad hoc using available knowledge, resulting in significant variability across projects and communities. The next generation of national consensus standards needs to provide analysis methods and design criteria for future hazard events (e.g., wind, storm surge, flooding, precipitation, and wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires), including consideration of their impacts on community resilience.

Design criteria that address future hazards and conditions require an understanding of how these hazards affect the performance of construction materials and structural systems in new and existing buildings and infrastructure. For example, the current approach for addressing structural reliability needs revision, as reliability methods based on historical events do not adequately address future nonstationary hazards and conditions. Current design criteria may lead to buildings and infrastructure that cannot withstand future events due to increased loads from future hazards or reduced capacity due to accelerated degradation. Accommodation of future hazards and conditions will reduce economic and social impacts through improved performance and post-event recovery.

The Roadmap will identify priority areas to advance the development of science-based data, methodologies, and guidance for future hazards and conditions in standards for buildings and infrastructure systems. These advances can lessen or prevent hazard impacts, drive commerce, and protect lives and property.

Research ​Plan
The Roadmap will be developed through a collaborative effort with subject matter experts and a stakeholder-driven process with federal and industry partners (e.g., FEMA, NOAA, ASCE, ICC) to identify research needs for the broader community. The project will consider various methods for incorporating future hazards and conditions in standards, including hazard characterization, structural performance, risk assessment, and recovery. The effort will provide a holistic look at the problem, considering multiple hazards at various scales, from the material to building to community scales.

A group of subject matter experts (SMEs) with expertise in science and engineering will work with NIST researchers to develop a state-of-the-art report. The report will review foundational documents, ongoing activities and current practices, and identify data, knowledge or practice gaps that need to be addressed. Future hazards include flood (sea level rise; coastal and inland flooding), wind (hurricane and tornadoes), precipitation (rain, snow, hail), atmospheric temperatures, wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires, and earthquakes (landslides). Construction material topics include performance and durability for future conditions (increased temperatures, humidity). Building and infrastructure topics include structural capacity, future hazard loads, structural reliability, and functionality over time. This publication serves as the basis for a series of workshops and the Roadmap.

A contractor is assisting NIST with hosting a series of workshops to inform the development of the Roadmap. The contractor will manage a steering committee of NIST staff and selected SMEs, which will develop the content for the workshops, informed by the state-of-the art report. The workshops will convene experts and stakeholders to collect information and resources on specific practice needs and implementation activities and obtain feedback on the gaps and needs identified in the NIST report. The data collected at the workshops will inform the Roadmap, which will include specific action items for standards and prioritized research activities. The Roadmap will identify short- and long-term actions and goals for addressing future hazard readiness of buildings and infrastructure.