Development of building information modeling template for environmental impact assessment

Abstract

Eco-friendly building designs that use building information modeling (BIM) have become popular, and a variety of eco-friendly building assessment technologies that take advantage of BIM are being developed. However, existing building environmental performance assessment technologies that use BIM are linked to external assessment tools, and there exist compatibility issues among programs; it requires a considerable amount of time to address these problems, owing to the lack of experts who can operate the programs. This study aims to develop eco-friendly templates for assessing the embodied environmental impact of buildings using BIM authoring tools as part of the development of BIM-based building life cycle assessment (LCA) technologies. Therefore, an embodied environmental impact unit database was developed, for major building materials during production and operating stages, to perform embodied environmental impact assessments. Moreover, a major structural element library that uses the database was developed and a function was created to produce building environmental performance assessment results tables, making it possible to review the eco-friendliness of buildings. A case study analysis was performed to review the feasibility of the environmental performance assessment technologies. The results showed a less than 5% effective error rate in the assessment results that were obtained using the technology developed in this study compared with the assessment results based on the actual calculation and operating stage energy consumption figures, which proves the reliability of the proposed approach. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.