This thesis was written during my Ph.D. activities from 2015 to 2018 at the Depart-ment of Civil, Environmental, Building Engineering and Chemistry (DICATECh), Poly-technic University of Bari. Moreover, I had the chance to be part of the research team at the Chair of Sustainable Construction, at ETH Zürich for six months.
Above all, I would like to thank prof. Dell’Osso for giving me the opportunity to work at his chair and for supervising my work. Since my Master thesis at Polytechnic Univer-sity of Bari, he has been keeping me motivated by sharing his knowledge and experi-ence in the field of engineering and architecture. He has pushed the knowledge over the edge of traditional approaches through a forward-looking vision while being con-stantly practical. He has been both my supervisor and mentor during the last years and gave me the right way of exploring a rewarding research topic.
Part of this thesis was written during my research period at ETH Zürich under the su-pervision of prof. G. Habert. I would like to thank him for giving me the chance to work at his chair, and for leading and inspiring me all the time. He steadily shared his knowledge and ground-breaking ideas, even after back in Italy in spite of the geo-graphical distance. I am very grateful to him for making me feel like full part of his re-search group through motivating meetings and frequent sharing moments.
Other people have supported me during my Ph.D. research. I would like to thank prof. Mossa for constantly providing me the right way of conducting my Ph.D. program. Special thanks are due to Alexander Hollberg who has always supported my activities since I met him for the first time at ETH. He has never grown weary of revising the work that we have done together and giving me feedback over and over.
