BIM USE IN GREEN BUILDING CERTIFICATION PROCESSES

Abstract

Green building certification schemes have been developed to incentivize sustainable construction leading to the development of green BIM technology, which uses multi-disciplinary data to support sustainable construction. However, due to a lack of understanding, interoperability, and technical issues, BIM is not widely used to support green building certification. This study investigates the current use of BIM for certification purposes, the building characteristics or information that need to be modeled, and the skills or knowledge required to use BIM for green building certification. The research, which employed a case study approach, examined the BIM use in a recently built 6 Green Star rated Head Office of a major supermarket chain in south Auckland. The main data collection methods were document analysis and semi-structured interviews with key project stakeholders. The results suggest that despite generally good knowledge of BIM and sustainable building design, the connection between BIM and green building certification is weak or non-existent. Instead, BIM is used mainly for model authoring, coordination, quantity take-off, and basic sustainability analysis. The main factors hindering BIM integration that have been identified are low-quality modeling, lack of multi-disciplinary coordination, and inefficient procurement. It is recommended that BIM usage should be accurately detailed and coordinated for downstream uses to gain the most value. Procurement should also accommodate appropriate BIM procedures to encourage multi-disciplinary coordination. Furthermore, new technology and research development are also needed to increase interoperability with sustainable (green) software.