Resilience in the built environment: How to evaluate the impacts of flood resilient building technologies?

The EU floods directive and its transcription into national legislation request exposed citizens and organisations to take individual measures to reduce flood risks on building scale. In response to that issue, a number of general approaches to buildings in flood risk areas and a set of strategies and technical guidance for the design and construction of flood resilient buildings have been developed in recent years. Particularly flood resilient building materials and constructions (FReMaCo), e.g. adapted exterior wall systems or floor arrangements, are expected to provide a considerable potential to limit flood damage if, for example, aperture technologies cannot stop water entering the building. However, there are significant uncertainties about the performance of FReMaCo that impede their comparison and hamper their uptake. To reduce those obstacles the paper discusses the application of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) (i) to quantify and to compare the physical flood vulnerability of various building constructions and (ii) to evaluate and to rank the impact of alternative FReMaCo options. The paper explores a set of eleven evaluation criteria ranging from statics criteria about buildings physics criteria up to durability criteria. The AHP generates a weight for each defined criterion and assigns a score for each FReMaCo option. Then, the AHP combines the criteria weights and the option scores to determine a global score for each construction alternative that evaluate the impact of FReMaCo options in a comprehensible manner. The application of AHP reduces the bias in the decision making process and is therefore of international interest, especially for those involved in improving the resilience properties of buildings.