No abstract

The construction industry is turning more and more towards sustainability. To achieve sustainability, a balance between environmental, economic and social aspects has to be reached. Therefore these criteria have to be taken into account during the building design phases. LCA is a suitable tool for assessing a building's environmental performance. Nevertheless, it has some issues that need to be resolved for its integration in the design process and use as an assessing design tool. By integrating LCA with other tools, such as BIM, a more holistic approach to sustainable construction could be achieved. Thus already existing tools can create synergies for attaining higher efficiency and sustainable construction. Furthermore, these tools should be implemented from the early project phases onwards, since the capacity to influence the project is greater in these phases. Finally, two different approaches for integrating LCA and BIM are presented in order to highlight future research fields.

Background: Nowadays wind energy is becoming increasingly significant in the planning, development and growth of new electricity supply systems. Special attention has been given to land-based turbines for ensuring the efficient economical operation of massive hubs rising 100m above the ground, based on the idea that the bigger the turbine, the more complicated are the transportation and assembly processes. Methods: A new design of a wind turbine has several advantages compared to conventional designs; one of these advantages lies in the use of prefabricated elements, which increases efficiency. The implementation of information technology as a complement to prefabrication techniques is a further aim of this research, which seeks to improve the overall performance of the project. Consequently, Building Information Modelling is suggested as the most suitable methodology for complementing off-site techniques and reaching higher efficiency by improving design, manufacture, transportation and assembly processes. Results: This paper will present the research project "hybrid² tower for wind turbines" funded by the State of Hesse, Germany, which focuses on a new, efficient and economical design for high wind turbine towers. The new hybrid² tower is composed of a concrete tower containing prefabricated concrete quarter-circle elements, steel beams and a steel tube tower on the top. The combination of concrete and steel beams improves the static and dynamic performance of the main supporting structure. With this new design, the weight of the concrete tower is estimated to decrease by 40 % compared to a traditional full-concrete tower and, as a positive consequence, the cost of assembly (including assembly on site) is reduced. Conclusions: Due to the energy revolution, a special focus is put on the development of renewable energies, especially wind power. The steadily increasing hub heights of wind turbines means that tower structures have to be more massive. The development of the hybrid² tower by using Building Information Modeling and prefabrication techniques leads to an optimized performance and reduces transport and assembly costs.

Although tremendous technological and strategic advances have been developed and implemented in the construction sector in recent years, there is substantial room for improvement in the areas of productivity growth, project performance, and schedule reliability. Thus, the present paper seeks to discover why the currently applied scheduling tools and the latest agile-based project organization approaches have not yet achieved their full potential. A missing interlinkage between the project’s design, cost, and time aspects within the project design phase and its sparse utilization throughout project execution were indicated as the driving contributors responsible for the slow progress in development. To fundamentally change this situation, an extensive and coherent project organization solution is proposed. The key process of this solution utilizes a 5D Building Information Model comprising tight concatenations between the individual model objects and the corresponding construction cost and time effort values. The key dates of a waterfall-based construction process simulation, set during the project planning phase, provide particular information to create a structure for agile organized project execution. The implementation of information feedback loops allows target/actual comparisons and contributes to continual improvements in future planning. A comparative case study was conducted with auspicious results on improvements in the overall project performance, and schedule and cost reliability.

Computer aid in Facility Management (FM) has been in use for about 40 years and has led to the so-called Computer Aided Facility Management (CAFM). CAFM offers various interfaces to exchange information between different kinds of tools. Various inter-trade organisations and associations have already developed information-exchange procedures. Besides the CAFM-developer, these organisations have defined information-exchange standards to integrate the Building Information Modeling (BIM) approach into FM, e.g. 3D visualization and underlying information concerning buildings and its devices. At this juncture (March 2017) the combination of BIM and FM is not only possible, it is mandatory. It is merely possible to exchange already existing information concerning the buildings. This implicates the acquisition and also adding the exchange of these information through to the chosen CAFM and BIM software tools. According to the fact that already existing information can only be used for the information exchange (and are later usable in FM), it is not possible to represent information which are related close to real-time. "Operating instead of reacting" is often used as a maxim in industry which leads to the integration of BIM and FM. The need of linking real-time data in FM is based on the requirement in the fields of energy management, central building control and safety systems. Via static and mobile sensors, information is collected and sent to CAFM-connectors. Within these connectors, information concerning BIM-linked building parts are transferred to an external database, which offers information management by the building participants, such as the architect, experts, project manager, building coordinator, investor and structural engineer. While using real-time data systems, lifecycle costs will decline while the whole life period of the building will increase, and safety for users will improve.