BIM and LCA integration proposal using service compositions

Abstract

The civil construction industry has been making efforts to achieve the technological advances necessary to guarantee the constant increase in the quality of buildings and, consequently, improve the sustainability of its products. In this sense, Building Information Modeling technology stands out to allow different teams and systems to communicate and add information to a project. On the other hand, the Life Cycle Assessment presents a systematic method for identifying the environmental performance of products, with the difficulty, however, of the need to compile and evaluate a relatively large amount of data, making the evaluator's work extremely complex and time-consuming. Therefore, the recent research for the integration of these two issues appears as a viable alternative to ensure that engineers, architects, and builders have access to important information during any phase in the development of the project and can, thus, make better decisions based on data provided by computational systems. Aiming at this integration, the present work presents an approach allowing the use of cost composition databases to estimate the bill of materials and life cycle inventories simultaneously in BIM environments, facilitating environmental indicators and costs parameters in parallel. Programming scripts were used to allow the conversion and organization of the data and the customization of multifunction BIM software to quantify building elements. The approach is then demonstrated in a case study of material selection, as an example, showing the functioning of what was developed.