Development of a BIM-based Environmental and Economic Life Cycle Assessment tool

Abstract

Currently, the built environment is one of the sectors that contribute the most to environmental impacts worldwide. As a result, the construction industry is increasingly adopting technologies and methodologies that promote the development of sustainable constructions, i.e. constructions that have low environmental, economic, and social impacts. Focusing on the environmental and economic impact of the construction, this research integrates the building information modelling (BIM) technology with the life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle costing (LCC) methodologies for the environmental and economic assessment of buildings. Building on the BIM-LCA/LCC framework and on the information delivery manual (IDM) and model view definition (MVD) for the BIM-LCA/LCC analysis, a BIM-based Environmental and Economic Life Cycle Assessment (BIMEELCA) tool is developed by the authors and detailed in this article. The BIMEELCA tool is used to support the decision-making process during early phases of a project and verify the feasibility of conducting automatic BIM-based LCA and LCC analyses in high-rise projects. A 250 m high-rise apartment, hotel, and office building is used to validate the usefulness of the tool at the early design stage. This case study demonstrates the feasibility to perform an automatic LCA and LCC analysis at this design stage by inserting in the model semantic information from generic databases. In the end, the benefits and limitations of the BIMEELCA tool are discussed. This research is expected to contribute to the promotion of semantically rich BIM models and the development of tailor-made BIM objects’ libraries specific to the needs of companies.