BIM-based ontology for sustainability-oriented building construction

Abstract

Recently, many researchers pay more attention to the emission estimation during the construction phase. They use simulation-based life cycle assessment (LCA) to analyze the construction processes. The input data of this evaluation process has been usually manual, time- consuming, and error-prone. Therefore, most emissions estimates were inaccurate. It is envisaged that with the aid of Building Information Modeling (BIM) technologies that are featured by semantic-rich data and information, the emission estimation can be significantly improved. An ideal BIM model typically encompasses information that ranges across building design, construction, and operation details. However, it lacks domain semantics in connection with extracting environmental-oriented construction information. This study aims to develop a BIM-based ontology for augmenting the simulation-based LCA method. Firstly, the proposed ontology's classes and object properties are formulated in the Protege environment to be suitable for emission assessment by the LCA method. Secondly, BIM data is extracted from a Revit model using the Revit application programming interface (API) and dotNetRDF to gen- erate the ontology's individuals and their data properties. Finally, the ontology's reasoning mechanism is adopted to infer information asinput data for the simulation-based LCA.