BIM-based sustainable building design process and decision-making

Sustainability is a major concern in the building industry due to the climate change and depletion of energy sources. Nevertheless, the current process of sustainable building design depends on various disjointed analyses to meet the different required sustainability performances. Building information modeling (BIM) allows for complex buildings being digitally modeled with accurate geometry and information for sustainable design process and decision-making during the early design stages. Therefore, the aim of this study is to integrate BIM with sustainable building design decision-making by considering the tropical climatic contexts in Malaysia. A BIM-based decision-making framework (DMF) was developed based on review on related literature and green building certifications as well as BIM tools evaluation. The proposed DMF supports design decision-making at multiple BIM Level of Development (LOD). Based on the framework, Revit template was developed to extract BIM data for decision-making. The research output deals with the challenges of decision-making in the early building design process by allowing for specific sustainability performance analyses.