Using Open BIM and IFC to Enable a Comprehensive Consideration of Building Services within a Whole-Building LCA

Sebastian Theißen,Jannick Höper,Stanimira Markova,Jan Drzymalla,Michaela Lambertz,Anica Meins-Becker,Reinhard Wimmer

doi:10.3390/su12145644

Abstract

Holistic views of all environmental impacts for buildings such as Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are rarely performed. Building services are mostly included in this assessment only in a simplified way, which means that their embodied impacts are usually underestimated. Open Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) provide for significantly more efficient and comprehensive LCA performance. This study investigated how building services can be included in an open BIM-integrated whole-building LCA for the first time, identified challenges and showed six solution approaches. Based on the definition of 222 exchange requirements and their mapping with IFC, an example BIM model was modeled before the linking of 7312 BIM objects of building services with LCA data that were analyzed in an LCA tool. The results show that 94.5% of the BIM objects could only be linked by applying one of the six solution approaches. The main problems were due to: (1) modeling by a lack of standardization of attributes of BIM objects; (2) difficult machine readability of the building services LCA datasets as well as a general lack of these; and (3) non-standardized properties of building services and LCA specific dataset information in the IFC data format.

Highlights

With the new EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) 2018/844, the requirements for energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources in buildings are being tightened up at EU and national levels [1]
The authors believe that building services need to be more addressed in environmental assessments of buildings when using the whole-building Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs), as they contribute to a meaningful share of embodied impacts, especially when designing and constructing high energy efficient buildings
The main objective of this study was to show which issues have to be faced and solved in order to enable a comprehensive consideration of building services within a whole-building LCA using open Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)

Summary

Introduction

With the new EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) 2018/844, the requirements for energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources in buildings are being tightened up at EU and national levels [1]. The problem with this development is that only the saving of energy consumption in the building operation phase is considered and environmental impacts resulting from production, dismantling and disposal are not taken into account. These embodied impacts become even more important when buildings are designed and built to a high energy efficiency standard [2]. The few studies in this research area show that, despite the low material mass share of building services of usually around 1–4% of the total building, it can be responsible for an unexpectedly high proportion of embodied impacts for new constructions of non-residential buildings [10]. There is a high necessity to consider building services in the assessment of embodied impacts in a more integrated and coherent way with the building design [14]

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