Construction sustainability through visualisation of building operation

Abstract

The maintenance phase of construction project exerts the biggest influence on project sustainability which is measured in terms of environmental, social and economic impacts. Building maintenance itself is profoundly influenced by decisions at the design phase. Typically, building maintenance programmes are designed using preventative or responsive approaches. While the former have an adverse impact on both the economic and environmental priorities, the responsive methods tend to compromise the interests of the users. It is therefore argued that the just-in-time methodology is the only approach that is capable of producing an optimised and balanced solution to building maintenance scheduling. However, due to its retrospective nature, this method has posed serious practical challenges. On the other hand, with the advent of visualisation technologies and virtual prototyping, we are now capable of making informed decisions about design parameters as well as generating building maintenance scheduling that would facilitate a just-in-time solution. This chapter presents a visual methodology for developing just-in-time solution through visualisation of the degradation of building components. To this end, the chapter presents the overall time-based visualisation model and demonstrates the simulation process for two major building components-the lighting and flooring systems.