Stock-constrained truss design exploration through combinatorial equilibrium modeling

Reusing structural components has potential to reduce environmental impacts of building structures because it reduces new material use, energy consumption, and waste. When designing structures through reuse, available element characteristics become a design input. This paper presents a new computational workflow to design structures made of reused and new elements. The workflow combines Combinatorial Equilibrium Modeling, efficient Best-Fit heuristics, and Life Cycle Assessment to explore different design options in a user-interactive way and with almost real-time feedback. The method applicability is demonstrated by a realistic case study. Results show that structures combining reused and new elements have a significantly lower environmental impact than solutions made of new material only.