Ali, Ahmed Kamal2014-07-162014-07-162012-12-07vt_gsexam:18http://hdl.handle.net/10919/49549Waste from construction and demolition-building activities is increasing every day. Landfills have almost reached their capacity. When thinking about the negative impact of demolishing activities on the environment it becomes very necessary to think about reusing and recycling building materials in new construction or perhaps better recycling our thoughts on how to make use of waste materials. In Kevin Lynch's book, Wasting Away, he wrote: "Architects must begin to think about holes in the ground and about flows of materials." Studies show that construction and demolition activities are the primary source of solid waste worldwide. For example construction and demolition wastes constitute about 40% of the total solid waste stream in the United States. The growing interest in materials and resource conservation in the United States is inherent in the growth of green building practices. The USGBC identifies six categories in the Materials and Resources (MR) section of LEED. One of these six categories is Resource Reuse (RR). Interestingly enough, a recent study about the cost of green buildings indicated that RR was the category credits least often achieved in most LEED certified projects. Literature suggests that there are a number of constraints and barriers to resource reuse primarily due to the complexity of buildings but perhaps the most important barrier, according to many architects, is the lack of easily accessible information to the design team on resource reuse. Therefore, as we promote the idea of building material reuse to a wider audience of designers and architects, we mus not forget that in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, both Reuse and Recycle terms are used interchangeably without yet a clear distinction between them. The use of arbitrary descriptions to distinguish reuse from recycle has caused nothing but more confusion to the public. This study argues that the real distinction between reuse and recycle exists in Knowledge and Information. This suggests that design with reuse requires a paradigm shift in the required knowledgebase and the way information flows within the design process. Unfortunately, the structure of this paradigm shift is not known and has not been well defined. Since knowledge forms the core of building a Decision Support Systems (DSS) for a design team in order to consider reuse, it is necessary to capture the required knowledge and information from the industry experts through a Knowledge Acquisition (KA) process. This knowledge can then be used to 1) identify the building material reuse criteria and 2) to build a prescriptive decision model and 3) to map the process design of the current traditional architectural design workflow and the proposed one. The overarching goal of this study is to use the building material reuse knowledgebase for 1) building a Unified Virtual Repository database to be connected to all available physical repositories and share a unified standard of information. 2) When the unified virtual repository is integrated with the Building Information Modeling (BIM) database, the DSS can work as a feedback and feed forward support for architects and designers as they consider building material reuse in new designs and constructions.ETDIn CopyrightReuseBuilding MaterialsDesign ProcessSalvageRecycleWasteBuilding Life CycleProcess DesignDynamic Knowledge BaseDissertation