Abstract
Building information modeling (BIM) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are two methods that can be helpful when designing buildings with lower environmental impacts. One of the most significant examples of environmental impact assessments in construction is green building certification. Certified buildings have improved performance and greater asset value. In this study, four certification systems were investigated for their potential interconnections with BIM and LCA. The main tasks were (1) to review a BIM-based workflow, (2) assess its usage as an input for the LCA within green certifications, and (3) provide suggestions for developing building models. Building models can be helpful during the design process, but the best results are expected when the specifically described steps are followed. These suggestions aim at improving building models in terms of their usage for green building certifications and particularly for LCA. All the investigated results were clarified and adjusted using a model of a recently finished building in Zug. As reference tools, One Click LCA and a manual process were selected. The outcomes were aligned with those of other studies and confirmed the necessity of good data and management quality for building projects.
Highlights
Researchers, such as Smil [1], and organizations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [2] and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) [3] have suggested that in the following decades, mankind will face large challenges in climate change and energy usage
An additional 1% is available for each “innovation credit” [38]
According to the research done for this paper, the One Click life cycle assessment (LCA) is currently one of the most developed tools [59] available on the market that can be used for a simplified LCA approach
Summary
Researchers, such as Smil [1], and organizations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [2] and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) [3] have suggested that in the following decades, mankind will face large challenges in climate change and energy usage. The current challenges and possible future outlook of LCA were well described by Fauzi et al [10]. This application requires a great deal of time, high levels of expertise, and a large amount of data, which are sometimes difficult to access. To make the LCA of buildings more obtainable for stakeholders, many tools have been developed to simplify, unify, and speed up the process. Overviews of such tools can be found in [9,11]
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