Sustainable building design: analysing the feasibility of BIM platforms to support practical building sustainability assessment

Abstract

Due to the time-consuming and complicated process of performing Building Sustainability Assessment (BSA), this is usually incompatible with construction companies’ deadlines. With the emergence of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the construction industry, the opportunity for BSA methods to adopt and benefit from BIM arises. Following a previous study, this paper aims to put in practice a proposed theoretical approach to facilitate the implementation of the BSA since the preliminary design stages using, as an example, the Portuguese SBToolPT-H method. Therefore, this paper analyses how BIM platforms can contribute to optimising the BSA evaluation. To achieve this goal, a case study was modelled and characterised in Autodesk Revit and, tailored parameters were created to support the assessment. The results show that Autodesk Revit can support the evaluation of 13 SBToolPT-H sustainability criteria, in a faster and automated way when faced with the traditional assessment process. The capabilities of BIM platforms and its wider use by designers can significantly contribute to the integration of BSA methods in the BIM collaborative process, thus contributing to a more sustainable built environment.