ARMS Tool

For a commercial building owner, ‘building resilience’ can be defined as the ability to protect, maintain, or restore the value of, functionality of, and income generated by a building after a damaging event or circumstance within a prescribed time frame. There is a need to measure the resilience of individual buildings to help owners make better decisions and protect their assets, to better assess the built environment resilience of larger geographic units such as communities and cities, and to complement existing assessments of building sustainability.

A new resilience assessment tool: the ‘Australian Resilience Measurement Scheme for buildings’ (ARMS) is currently under developed. The rating scheme adopts resilience as a holistic concept incorporating physical, infrastructural, environmental, economic–social, political–regulatory, and organisational resilience, and is rated according to dimensions, sub-dimensions, and items scored on a points system.  The scheme will allow the aspects in which a building is performing well or poorly to be identified as well as give an overall resilience rating.    

The development of the (ARMS) tool will assist professionals who are committed to implementing resilience into their construction projects and to accelerate their move towards resilience.