Hire an Illini
Lu Zhang
- Advisor:
- Nora El-Gohary
- Departments:
- Areas of Expertise:
- Information and Knowledge Management
- Building Information Modeling (BIM)
- Sustainability
- Construction management
- Thesis Title:
- Axiology-based Modeling and Valuation for Value-Sensitive Building Design
- Thesis abstract:
- A report published by the National Research Council of the National Academies defined the research on understanding and quantifying the environmental, social, and economic value of our infrastructure systems to its stakeholders - and how this value is impacted by the various planning, design, construction, operation, and investment decisions - as a "national imperative". However, there is still a lack of understanding and formalized modeling of what different stakeholders (e.g., owner, contractor, building end-user) value (e.g., energy conservation, safety, economic growth) in infrastructure systems and how to valuate (i.e. quantify the worth) the infrastructure systems based on these values. My PhD research focuses on the area of axiology-based value analysis of buildings using a formal axiology. Axiology is a theory of value (worth) that explores questions such as: what are the objects that we value? and how to measure the value of these objects? The proposed formal axiology is a theory-based, semantic model for valuating and analyzing the value (worth) of buildings based on the environmental, social, and economic values of stakeholders. The model-based value analysis involves five primary tasks: (1) discovering what stakeholders value, (2) constructing a mathematical model that quantifies the value (worth) of a building based on the discovered stakeholder values, (3) developing a semantic, axiological model that represents the mathematical model in a formal and computer-understandable way, and (4) integrating the semantic model with existing Building Information Models (BIMs) to facilitate automated value analysis.
- Downloads:
Contact information:
luzhang7@illinois.edu