Enabling Automatic LCA at Any Stage of the Building Based on Its BIM Model

Abstract

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a whole building is a well-known process used to assess its environmental impact. The construction domain does not use this process at this time because it requires too much information and collecting it is very labor intensive. This paper identifies the information needed to perform an LCA at any level of development of a Building Information Modelling (BIM) model and proposes some solutions to fill the information gap of an early stage BIM model. After the required information is identified, the interoperability strategy is analyzed to propose a framework introducing a way to organize the LCA of a whole building, as well as a new file format to share information between BIM and LCA software. The proposed framework enables an LCA to be performed, without manual input, at every iteration of the BIM model. This framework was previously presented at the Creative Construction Conference 2019 and this paper is an extended version of that paper.