PSI - Issue 78

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 78 (2026) 678–685

© 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of XX ANIDIS Conference organizers Keywords: Life-Cycle Assessment; Retrofit Design; Bracing Systems; Carbon Tax Abstract Life-cycle-based design of constructions is today a crucial aspect of sustainable development. In structural engineering, this means that both the design of new constructions and the retrofitting of existing ones must account for economic, environmental, and social sustainability principles. Although these goals are well defined, there is a lack of design approaches that adopt these principles as key performance criteria. There is therefore a need to develop methodologies that integrate concepts, metrics, and tools aligned with a life-cycle thinking approach. With this aim, the present work proposes an optimization method for the retrofitting of RC buildings using dissipative bracing systems. The method determines the properties of the bracing system by fulfilling safety requirements while optimizing economic and environmental performance, expressed through sustainability-based metrics. This is achieved by assessing structural response on linearized models and evaluating performance using probabilistic approaches such as SAC-FEMA, ensuring the method’s applicability even to complex structures. The paper demonstrates the application of this procedure to an existing multi-storey RC building, presenting and discussing the bracing characteristics, structural response, and life-cycle metric assessment. XX ANIDIS Conference Sustainability-driven design method for RC buildings retrofitting through dissipative bracing Ra ff aele Laguardia a, ∗ , Solomon Tesfamariam b , Paolo Franchin a a University of Rome La Sapienza, Via Gramsci 53, Rome 00197, Italy b University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo ON N2L 3G1, Canada

1. Introduction

Today, the need to consider sustainability issues in engineering design has become increasingly evident, in par ticular, the recovery of existing constructions from a sustainability perspective has become an essential objective. To do so, new design methods and construction processes compatible with new performance requirements are needed. Accounting for sustainability within the design means considering the principles of sustainable development: eco nomic, environmental, and social. The assessment of metrics related to those new aspects inevitably requires a life

∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: ra ff aele.laguardia@uniroma1.it

2452-3216 © 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of XX ANIDIS Conference organizers 10.1016/j.prostr.2025.12.087