Semantically enriched BIM Life Cycle Assessment to enhance Buildings' Environmental Performance

The reduction of carbon emissions has become a priority for the building industry, in particular due to recent sustainability-driven building regulations and policies. Recent studies have examined how new computational technologies that utilise Building Information Modelling (BIM) can address a range of sustainability-related issues. Amongst those, the assessment of building environmental impact has been highlighted as being of particular importance as it can offer valuable guidance to design teams and policy makers. This paper presents an embedded framework that integrates BIM with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) components by utilising different data inventories to support the decision rationale for achieving environmental responsible designs. Results from a test study indicate that the practical application of the proposed embedded framework constitutes a useful and intuitive workflow that could potentially improve the environmental performance of different building systems by augmenting existing materials databases and by supporting the collaboration between the design and construction supply chains.