Project sustainability: Criteria to be introduced in BIM

Quality in architecture has become a topic of strategic importance in the construction sector and it holds an increasingly important place in regulations adopted by European countries. To meet the parameters set for architectural quality, sustainability and green buildings assessment tools are crucial, whether the project concerns the narrowest scale of a building or the largest scale of a city. Related to that, a large number of countries has issued energy certification procedures that rate the energy performance of buildings. The phase of conceptual design of a building is the most appropriate to integrate strategies meant to enhance sustainability. Implementing those strategies at the very beginning of the construction process, brings to cost reduction compared to doing so at a later stage. A wide range of green building assessment tools and protocols has been developed to improve the quality of the design process; their goal is to cut energy consumption and environmental impacts in both the construction and the management phases and thus abiding also to regulations. A large number of studies has been published regarding those assessment tools; they are usually divided into 2 main groups: a) based on a multi-criteria analysis, such as BREEAM, LEED, CASBEE b) based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, such as BEES, BEAT, EcoQuantum. The growing use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) plays a key role in this realm. It allows the evaluation of multiple design scenarios at the same time from an environmental and financial points of view. This paper is focused on the possible integrating the green building assessment tools into BIM’s software data systems.