Integration of BIM in building sustainability assessment methods

The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is highly responsible for several environmental impacts and worldwide authorities and societies are increasingly looking for more sustainable buildings. Given the ambitious targets of climate neutrality and decarbonisation, there is an urgent need to develop specific strategies to act in the building sector, as it has been recognised as a key industry to reverse environmental impacts. Among the existing tools, Building Sustainability Assessment (BSA) methods stand out as a pathway to evaluate and promote the integration of sustainability principles in buildings. However, such methods often require multi-disciplinary information about the building and significant resources such as time, money, and human labour. Consequently, and in the absence of mandatory legislation, BSA is usually neglected or applied in project later stages just to provide a sustainable evaluation of the building. With the deployment of Building Information Modelling (BIM), the opportunity for BSA to adopt and benefit from BIM functionalities arises. Currently, BIM has not been used comprehensively in the evaluation process of BSA but the potential for process automation and simplification are well known. To effectively integrate BSA into BIM environment, this research aims to develop a BIM integration framework for the Portuguese residential BSA method SBToolPT-H. Moreover, such framework will be materialized by the creation of an enduser BIM-based application – SBToolBIM – which will act as a decision support tool regarding building sustainability for the project's early stages. SBToolBIM will automate and accelerate the assessment of SBToolPTH by reflecting its criteria through computable rules. Results show the attractiveness of SBToolBIM, as well as the possibility to have real-time feedback about the building sustainability level in early project stages, allowing for the introduction and comparison of different sustainability measures with few resources. SBToolBIMhas established a novel and common approach which can be used as a systematic framework to apply BIM in other BSA schemes, representing a pathway to reduce the building sector impacts and provide valuable contributes to reach worldwide climate neutrality and decarbonisation targets.