Abstract
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used for decision-making in the design process of buildings and neighbourhoods. Therefore, visualisation of LCA results to support interpretation and decision-making becomes more important. The number of building LCA tools and the published literature has increased substantially in recent years. Most of them include some type of visualisation. However, there are currently no clear guidelines and no harmonised way of presenting LCA results. In this paper, we review the current state of the art in visualising LCA results to provide a structured overview. Furthermore, we discuss recent and potential future developments. The review results show a great variety in visualisation options. By matching them with common LCA goals we provide a structured basis for future developments. Case studies combining different kinds of visualisations within the design environment, interactive dashboards, and immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, show a big potential for facilitating the interpretation of LCA results and collaborative design processes. The overview and recommendations presented in this paper provide a basis for future development of intuitive and design-integrated visualisation of LCA results to support decision-making.
Highlights
The analysis showed that most building Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools focus on the detailed design stages while there are slightly more scientific papers addressing the early design stages
Similar to the building LCA tools, the majority of the visualisations presented in the literature address building design professionals
The importance of making LCA results understandable for decision makers is growing as LCA is increasingly used in the design process as a basis for environmental performance assessment of buildings and neighbourhoods
Summary
It has become mandatory to submit a calculation of the so-called embodied environ mental impact related to the manufacturing of building materials as part of the building permit application process in the Netherlands [3], for example. The method has been developed initially for consumer products and is standardised in the ISO 14040/44 [9,10] framework. The method consists of four phases: goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory (LCI), life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), and interpretation. EN 15804 [11] has been developed for the LCA of building materials and provides a basis for Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). EN 15978 [12] describes one approach for the LCA of a building and defines several life cycle stages: A production and construction, B use, and C end-of-life of buildings. Databases espe cially developed for building materials, such as KBOB [13] or okobau
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