Building information modelling for an automated building sustainability assessment

Abstract

In the past few decades, sustainability has become one of the world's most important but also controversial subjects. The construction industry, in particular, has a significant impact on societies' sustainability, prompting the creation of certifications and standards designed for mitigating the impact of buildings on the natural environment. However, despite the efforts to clearly quantify a sustainable building, the complexity of this term and its assessment, challenge an easy evaluation. This article aims to connect Building Information Modelling (BIM) and sustainability, by means of an automated BIM-based software, to tackle this problem. This software, which was developed as a plugin for BIM-modelling software, assists on updating the applied certification by simplifying its parameters, easing its calculations and helping the user choose the credits to acquire. The example certification is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). However, since sustainability is such a broad topic, this article limits itself to a portion of LEED, extracting overall conclusions from the acquired results. This particular portion relates to stormwater runoff management, proposing an intuitive tool to calculate the runoff of a building site, regardless of building type, while also offering Low-Impact Development (LID) Best Managing Practices (BMP) to address the issues identified.