No 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.

The use of building information modelling (BIM) is increasingly popular and results in the BIM model becoming the central data source in a construction project. The information available in BIM is hard to use because it lacks interoperability. This paper assesses every strategy to share data from BIM in order to support a life cycle assessment (LCA) for a whole building at every step of the BIM model design. Every open file format concerning the BIM is analyzed to determine if one file format can fulfill the data requirements of an LCA. Among all of these file formats, IFC is the best-known and most detailed format. An in-depth analysis of the IFC data schema and syntax is performed to determine whether the construction industry requires a specific file format for LCA purposes or whether one of the existing open file formats can be used as a data source.Determining the LCA of an entire building is a complex process that needs a lot of data [3,5,7,10,11]. To simplify the LCA process, many research projects use the BIM model as their data source [3,5,8,