Resource Management in the built environment: Research
The construction, use, retrofit and deconstruction of buildings and infrastructure still cause high impacts on the environment. Particularly, main impacts are caused by material consumption, debris/remnants and emissions of CO2 and other gases to cover the energy demand especially for heating and domestic hot water. Furthermore, the conversion of open space to settlement and traffic areas has attracted notice and its reduction topic has become part of the German sustainability strategy. Altogether, the life cycle of buildings and infrastructure is still far from being sustainable.
Therefore, there are huge challenges in transforming the construction sector and related industries to a more sustainable development, that are also influenced by other fields, e.g. mobility and energy/heat consumption.
Main research fields:
- "Energie- und Wärmewende", Energy transition and renewable energies
- Air pollution and climate protection strategies
- Strategies of sustainable construction
- Sustainable urban development, communal land use management strategies
- Environmental life cycle assessment and eco-design for buildings, design-for-deconstruction
- Modeling of building stock, digitization of de-/construction and its processes
- Material flow models, recovery and recycling of construction and deconstruction waste (selective demolition)
- Dismantling of nuclear power plants
- Supply chains of (recycled) construction materials
Main methods (selection):
- Techno-economic analysis
- Modelling of the building stock and households, modelling of the actors (simulation & system dynamics)
- Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); Life Cycle Costing (LCC)
- Project management and optimization
- Capacity planning and location modeling (Optimization), logistics networks and optimization
- Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)
- Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)
- Indicator models
- Scenario analysis