Performance-Based Habitability Design and Assessment of Tall Buildings Using Full-Scale Data

<p>As an increasing number of tall buildings are built each year, the need to validate and improve their design process becomes increasingly urgent. This thesis contributes to this effort, first by proposing an automated modular framework for assessing building behavior in full-scale. This includes an automated system identification technique with quality assurance checks as well as novel response parameterization modules. These tools are applied to Burj Khalifa to demonstrate long-term behavioral patterns, validate design philosophies, and explore atypical wind and seismic events in depth. This evaluation demonstrated a significant overestimation of predicted damping and a non-negligible contribution from higher modes, in contrast with typical design assumptions. In addition, a robust performance-based habitability design method is proposed that enables engineers and owners to define performance objectives specific to the project, with an accompanying assessment framework to support design validation and automated performance feedback through continuous monitoring.</p>