Streamlining BIM-integrated LCA for rapid-iterative-informed-early stage upfront carbon assessment by architects and engineers

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is rapidly evolving in the EU and around the world, and it is used to calculate and assess the environmental impact of buildings throughout their life cycle. Many EU countries have decided to add new embodied carbon regulations in their building codes, and thus, the calculation of environmental impact is becoming mandatory. We present a decision support system based on Building Information Modelling (BIM) that provides architects and engineers with streamlined LCA information on highly uncertain designs at an early stage. The system is designed to be extremely simple and easy to comprehend, and it executes LCA calculations fast enough for real-time use. Our key contribution is to elaborate, comprehensively implement, and evaluate the new sustainability opportunity metric (SOM) that we had briefly introduced in our earlier work. Assigned to BIM model components, the metric intends to identify sustainability opportunities and risks by quickly evaluating numerous independent building elements despite early-stage design uncertainty. In this paper, we demonstrate the first fully integrated toolchain and tools prototypes as a plug-in for Revit. We develop the tool to conduct visualisation and usability experiments, and empirically evaluate it on five complex BIM-based high-rise projects.