Risk Management in Designing and Developing Innovative, Sustainable Buildings

Nowadays, we can observe a growing interest in sustainable buildings. Sustainable development cannot be achieved without introducing innovations in green building; therefore, innovations are important component of sustainable engineers’ job. Innovative, sustainable buildings have numerous advantages, but it should be remembered that their design, and construction is more complex and associated with higher risk and uncertainty than traditional buildings. The goal of this work is to propose a new model of risk management which is based on fault tree analysis and Fuzzy sets theory. Sixteen unwanted events in innovative, sustainable building projects were identified, a fuzzy fault tree was developed. The application of the proposed approach was shown on one example of innovative, sustainable building in Poland. Two variants of project execution were compared: with and without introducing risk management strategy. Application of fuzzy sets by using linguistic variables by experts when assessing risks of particular unwanted events enabled to decrease uncertainty and avoid problems with obtaining the crisp values of the basic events probability. Application of the proposed model allowed us to identify the critical risks of the project, calculate top event risk, and compare the project’s risk level after introducing risk management strategies. The proposed model is helpful for designers, constructors, owners, and clients to develop successful innovative, sustainable buildings.