BIM-based sustainability assessment: insights for building circularity

Abstract

Facing the increased pursuit for sustainable buildings, the construction industry has been adopting new project technologies such as Building Sustainability Assessment (BSA) and Building Information Modelling (BIM), providing new potentialities like continuous data storage, optimised building performance and integrated building design. Facing the opportunity to integrate BSA into BIM, a BIM-based application—SBToolBIM—was developed to automate BSA during the project early stages. Visual Programming Language (VPL) was used to translate 19 criteria requirements from SBToolPT-H and additional BIM connections were identified for the remaining 6 criteria. The applied procedure has established a novel framework to carry out BSA within the BIM environment in a faster reliable way. Such a method can provide valuable insights for a BIM-based application for building circularity assessment by using similar structures and procedures. This research aims to explore SBToolBIM in order to identify possible insights which can be replicated for a BIM-based application to assess buildings circularity potential. Results show the potentialities of SBToolBIM structure for circularity purposes, as different multidisciplinary data can be stored in the BIM model, novel Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be easily integrated and the evaluation structure can be adapted according to the analysis requirements.