Integrated Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to Building Information Modelling (BIM)

Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are at the core of construction projects. LCA is one of the key elements of sustainability in the construction projects and an improved LCA process can be achieved through the adoption of BIM. Exploring the characteristics of a BIM-based LCA process from the different perspectives of interoperability and identifying the effects of adopting regionally different EPD databases are significant. The LCA add-in tools, One Click LCA and Tally, have been selected to identify the differences in the LCA results caused by adopting regionally different Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) databases. To observe the differences in the LCA results, the LCA processes were run through the LCA add-in tools. The input data, the system boundaries and the LCA scope were kept the same for the LCA processes. The LCA results were produced through the integrated LCA add-in tools. The GWP values in manufacturing module, produced by One Click LCA, were embedded into the Solibri model of Akademiska Sjukhuset project. Value level of interoperability in the BIM-based LCA processes was detected and analyzed according to the interaction types that were obtained between the LCA add-in tools and the BIM software. Obstacles in increasing the value level of interoperability to a higher level in today’s BIM-based LCA processes were also focused. Furthermore, the benefits and drawbacks of the BIM-based LCA processes were identified. At last, the differences between BIM-based LCA and traditional LCA process were identified along with future possibilities. It was observed that adopting regionally different EPD databases has significant effects on the LCA results. The semantic detail level of the BIM model and the data extraction quality came to the forefront in identifying the benefits and drawbacks. The interaction types in the studied BIM-based LCA processes were identified as “Collaboration” interaction type. Accordingly, the value level of interoperability in both BIM-based LCA processes was obtained as the high level of value innovation along with efficiency and differentiation. Moreover, the convenience of use, time and resource efficiency and improved accuracy obtained through the BIM-based LCA processes were concluded as some of the major differences from the traditional LCA processes.